- Joined
- Mar 5, 2002
- Location
- Bellevue, WA
whuh?!?!1 WHY?!? you ask?
Well, frankly I am going to be doing this as a proof of concept and because I am curious to see how efficient I can make the poor thing... then when I make it is as efficient as I can, I might use it to cool a NB or GPU and use the same ideas to optimize the best heatsinks further than they already are.
For starters I am going to lap the thing and see what kind of temps that gets me.
Fan replacement is an obvious choice as well. I have a ton of fans left over from the various systems I have had over the years so that is no problem.
After these two very obvious means of optimizing the heatsink, it gets a bit more dicey.
I am thinking of making a custom shroud (out of duct tape and cardboard if need be) to optimally rout airflow.
Then there is the issue of surface area. More importantly, how to expand it. I had to put on my thinking cap to do the math for this one, but I am thinking about punching precisely sized holes through the fins of the heatsink to enlarge the surface area and create more turbulent flow. The equation is as follows: The radius of the hole must be less than the width of the fin the hole goes through because, where the surface area being removed by the hole equals 2πR², the surface area added by the circumference of the hole multiplied by the width of the fin equals 2πR*W, where W is the width of the fin.
Either that, or I could crosscut the heatsink to convert it to a pin array, but then the width of each cut has to be less than the width of each fin...
Whatever the case, I am wondering what else I could do to the stock heatsink (aside from throwing it out) to improve its performance.
Well, frankly I am going to be doing this as a proof of concept and because I am curious to see how efficient I can make the poor thing... then when I make it is as efficient as I can, I might use it to cool a NB or GPU and use the same ideas to optimize the best heatsinks further than they already are.
For starters I am going to lap the thing and see what kind of temps that gets me.
Fan replacement is an obvious choice as well. I have a ton of fans left over from the various systems I have had over the years so that is no problem.
After these two very obvious means of optimizing the heatsink, it gets a bit more dicey.
I am thinking of making a custom shroud (out of duct tape and cardboard if need be) to optimally rout airflow.
Then there is the issue of surface area. More importantly, how to expand it. I had to put on my thinking cap to do the math for this one, but I am thinking about punching precisely sized holes through the fins of the heatsink to enlarge the surface area and create more turbulent flow. The equation is as follows: The radius of the hole must be less than the width of the fin the hole goes through because, where the surface area being removed by the hole equals 2πR², the surface area added by the circumference of the hole multiplied by the width of the fin equals 2πR*W, where W is the width of the fin.
Either that, or I could crosscut the heatsink to convert it to a pin array, but then the width of each cut has to be less than the width of each fin...
Whatever the case, I am wondering what else I could do to the stock heatsink (aside from throwing it out) to improve its performance.