Evilsizer said:
the only thing that bothers me is why people assume that the heatpipe on there mobo has a wick. Im looking at my ab9 pro with a heatpipe and the construction looks like crap. even the heatpipe it self looks really cheap.
*Look at the price of the mobo, look at what you get on the mobo. Do you really expect them to spend more money and risk people not buying there boards cause instead of the mobo being 225-250. It is 300+ just because they put wicks inside the heatpipe.*
*= open thought
I'm not sure it so unreasonable. Modern heatpipe-based CPU cooler have wicks, and you can install them in any orientation. Their price has not increased by $50-75, so why should people expect such a premium on a mainboard?
Anyway, thinking about it some more it seems to me that the whole cooling system as used on the P5B Deluxe is a gimmick. I'm sure it provides some cooling, enough to keep things working, but it doesn't look like it anywhere near efficient. Here's some things that got my attention:
- Why are the heatsinks on the south- and northbridge chips covered with a logo plate? This is sure to decrease heat dissipation unless you focus airflow through the tunnel underneath, which would require a focused fan. Even then it would probably work better as an open design.
- Where is the heat from the northbridge (the main source of heat I guess) moved to? It is connected to a thin sink that covers HALF of the mosfets involved in the power delivery on the board. Note how the other mosfets on the other side of the socket are not even sinked.
So if these mosfets don't get very hot, then the little sink on them that the heatpipe is connected to may actually help a little to dissipate the NB heat. But it won't help to keep your mosfets cool in that case! If the mosfets do get hot, then the the heatsink on them is far from the best spot to get rid of extra NB-generated heat! So why design it this way?
- Finally, if simply 'sharing the burden' is the idea here, what benefit does this have other than creating an average heat across multiple chips (raising one temp and reducing the other)?
An effective heatpipe design would connect sinks on the hot chips to an open radiator (perhaps on the back panel, like Abit has done in the past, if I recall correctly), and I would think wicks are required for proper operation.