4kg passive cooling setup?

Well, there's a guy selling 4kg of P4 coolers (10 in total) for about 30USD (thats with postage) and it seems perfect for a passive cooling just because of the sheer size. No fans/mountings available.



Thats a sideview of the heatsinks, and as you can see they're mostly aluminium and some copper fins in the middle.



As you can see thats a lot of real-estate.

My idea would be to tap the base of each heatsink and then cool down a lenght of copper piping by measuring first, then sticking the thing in a freezer and then mounting. This would be my first thought when arranging them:


2 loops or one loop split into two to make better use of the cooling area

What I'm wondering about is the way that this array should be arranged and the feasibility. I got the skills to make the thing, but will passive cooling in an average 20C ambient be enough to dissipate all the heat from a modern computer?

Im not an expert but id just go for a car radiator before the above setup.

Bensa said:

then cool down a lenght of copper piping by measuring first, then sticking the thing in a freezer and then mounting.

Click to expand...

That sentence is incomprehensible.

billb said:

That sentence is incomprehensible.

Click to expand...

Copper shrinks by a larger margin than aluminium when cooled down, therefore it can fit into a hole designed for it at room temperature in an aluminium. When its brought back to normal temp, it will make a tight seal=good thermal transfer.

The measuring bit comes in when I take the thermal expansion constant for that material (copper) into account, since it does a loop at the end, I will have to make the loop just a bit larger to begin with so it will fit into the aluminium bases in a cooled temp. When brought back to room temp, there will be some stress on the end loop but hopefully not much.

A majority of car radiators are not designed to be passive cooled, they use the air moving through them from the cars own movement. And for $30, this is quite a bit of cooling capacity (add in a max of $10 for piping/misc. items).