Adding vapor chamber to a heatsink

So i came across a vapor chamber that can be bought seperately, and can me mounted on top of the DIE area of a cpu.

Because i saw @Mr. Fox his marvelous video:

it inspired me to do the same, but then replacing the copper shim with a vapor chamber and solder it on a heatsink.

https://www.aliexpress.com/store/pr...ml?spm=2114.12010612.8148356.7.59aa4298mpMgxs This is the vapor chamber which can be used on the cpu.

and the idea is to make something like this:


no pipes, no imbalance just two pieces of copper attached to heatsink fins so the fans can blow air through the fins creating the temperature difference so the heat can travel from warm-> cold.

@Mr. Fox @iunlock @alexnvidia @rinneh @Papusan what are your thoughts about it (and other people can also join in ! the more people the merrier)

 

Damn right I will follow this. that would be an incredible mod. Knowing that you stated you work in airplane mechanics, im sure you can pull it off.
TH eonyl thing that worries me is how tall the heatsink becomes?

 

Your Aw17R5 has already a cheap Vapor Chamber heatspreader instead for the usual copper cold plate for Cpu. The cooling won’t be better than the weakest point. A Vapor chamber won’t do a ****y if the heat can’t be thrown out from the chassis or the fits on top of die is bad. Or third... TRIPOD DESIGN which create uneven pressure!

And don’t forget add 3mm on top force pads changes.

 

Yes true, but a heatspreader is different than a vapor chamber. And it's actually just a copper coldplate, i destroyed the old heatsink i bought for my R4, and found out it was just a cold plate, but they polished it. The heat can be thrownout, just not fast enough when it's being build up. The reason laptops with more copper cools better than BGA is because most of the times those laptops have 6 or 7 heatpipes compared to the three BGA uses. It has nothing to do with what type of CPU is being used, but more with how the copper is laid out, and heat they can suck up. As you would agree, six heatpipes can hold alot more heat than 3 pipes. especially when those 3 pipes are flat.

i would also not build a heatsink, but a complete vapor chamber like the picture. It would have no pipes, but the chamber would be directly overlayed on top of the die area so the vapor chamber can suck up all the heat, and transfer them to the heatsink blocks how razer did it.

Thank you for your input brother

 

So the idea is not to use a heatsink, but make a complete vapor chamber, so no copper for transfering heat, only copper for the heatsink block where the air is being blownout. What razor did is create a full vapor chamber design. This allows for a slimmer laptop cause there is no need for piping.

If i would modify the existing heatsinks, i would remove the existing coldplate, and attach the vapor chamber where the coldplate sits. This would increase the height only a few mm due to the vapor chamber sticking out, where is the coldplat was flat. with a little bit of polishing the vaporchamber should sit flat where the coldplate sits.

 

oh thats quite the project. super curious about how it would turn out.

The older heat sink version seem to have less clean solder betweent he cold plate & heatpipes. Maybe if you acquire one. you can desolder them and work based on that.

I will take a photo of it later to compare an older with a newer heatsink. I got a version 2 and 7 as of this time.

 

Good info ! everybit of information you have is welcome brother ! if that's possible, it would make it easier to detach the colplate from the pipes. That would be my only concern. What apple does with the macbook (using the chassis partly as cooling) is what i want do, but instead of using the body, i'm going to use the whole surface of the vaporchamber as a heatspreader to not only suck up the heat, but spread it evenly across the vapor chamber surface, this should make it easier to dissipate the heat, because it's not being centered anymore (just like how it currently is being done).

it can be as small as:



or the size of a normal cpu coldplate.

 

i believe the R5 heatsink, or R4 heatsink for that matter are both good heatsinks capable of handling the heat generated by the CPU and GPU. the problem lies on the actual contact surface of the CPU and heatsink, which despite being improved in R5 with a stronger tension arm, is still not enough to create a properly balanced contact surface. some of the pictures posted by R5 owners here still show the CPU has uneven heatsink contact from the way the thermal paste spread over the CPU die and heatsink plate.

due to the density of the CPU core, a lot of heat is being pushed out from a small surface area (relative to GPU die size) and if the heat is not being drawn away fast enough, that's when the CPU will overheat, throttle or get sudden high temp spike. Alienware engineers know about this which is why they added a "vapour chamber" plate to the CPU side. if you can get the heatsink to sit really flat with the CPU, i'm very sure the thermal performance will be excellent. GTX1080 is pumping out 180W or more if you overclock and yet the thermal performance in R4 and R5 are just top notch outclassing even GT75 with ridiculous amount of heatpipes. till this day i still find it amazing during gaming (witcher 3, far cry 5,BF1 etc) i'm getting less than 65C (typically 62C, room temp 23C) even when overclocked to 1950MHz.

 

What did you mean by this? Can you clarify?

 

If you soldered on 3mm Vapor Chamber heatspreader on top of the orginal heatsink cold plate... You will need to compensate with equal thicker thermal pads. And the selection of quality thermal pads will become less if you go out of specs. Stacking of pads is a bad solution. You will lose 50% of the thermal performance.Add in flawed TRIPOD mounting mechanism to connect the pieces... Then you can see where I go.
Design and create/make your own fully working Vapor Chamber heatsink in whole shared design (gpu/cpu) ain't for all.

 

yes, but i wouldn't solder it on to the existing coldplate. I would replace the coldplate with a vapor chamber

Well the problem is, they aint. maybe for the four core's it's enough but for the six core's it aint't enough. If i'm playing for example star citizen, that game alone generates 70/80 watts of heat on the cpu. Than you have a GPU that tends to pull 180+ instead of the 180 Max wattage, so if you don't take some extra cooling in consideration (for the 6 core's not 4) they will run hot. OC'ing is out of question. my 7820HK COULD pull up to 65 watts when gaming, but now with two extra cores those two will also generate heat. i don't know @ which setting you play but i play uncapped (120Hz G-sync screen so i don't have a frame target) and @1440p so my gpu always tend to run hot. That "Vapor Chamber" is also just a polished cpu coldplate, nothing else. I ordered an R5 heatsink for my R4 but when my R4 broke down, i got moved to an equally specced R5. i destroyed to see how much of an vapor chamber it was and voila AW his marketing makes a polished coldplate, a vapour chamber. I have some pictures of star citizen with 80Watts on the cpu and 180 on the gpu. All i see is thermal throttle flags on my cpu when i let it run loose. But i do agree that the heatsink is more than enough for the R4. The r4 heatsink itself, or the R5 heatsink.

 

Guys, the idea i saw in Aorus 17 (vapor chamber + heatpipes).

https://www.aorus.com/product-detail.php?p=1277&t=35&t2=&t3=

 

I know digikey offers custom vapor chambers with help on designing. not sure how much is cost though $$$$$$ it could be nothing but maybe work trying?

 

Actually a similar solution to this might do the trick better than the chamber