Hello folks I’m back again with my PC Mod pic of the day- Project: Passive, built by Ville ‘Willek’ Kyrö.
This guy went ahead and build a PC that uses all passive cooling, that is, no fans whatsoever! Let’s take a quick glance at what he did, and I’ll tell you why I think it’s so awesome.
For starters, he tore apart an existing heatsink to get the heatpipes out, that takes some balls!
I’ve done this sort of thing before and let me tell you – it’s time consuming. So kudos to him for taking an existing product and reworking it into what he needed for his mod. When reinstalling heat pipes of this nature, it’s important to make sure they’ve got a good connection to the chip die and whatever they are sinking the heat too. I often use Arctic Silver thermal paste, it costs a bit more but gets the job done.
Just placing tubes on plates, or clamping them together might not always be enough because of the many microscopic “surface differences” between them. This would be especially true if you had bent or modified the pipes – their surface area may not be even. By using a thermal paste you can improve the contact of the two parts.
Basically he built his own copper heatsinks for the chip dies, then used the heatpipes to extend them onto enormous motherboard-engulfing heatsinks. The shape of the case itself creates a bit of convection and helps pull the warm air up.
I wonder if someday when computers are built into our homes if they’ll be tied to the heating system… I mean it only makes sense!
Here’s an end view of the unit. I love how it looks like some sort of industrial jet turbine engine… all of the heatsink fins give the shape a very mechanical and functional look. In many ways it reminds me of the design of the Red One camera, built to look industrious.
This thing is thinking “Must terminate Eddie Furlong / Nick Stahl / and or Christian Bale…”
The attention to detail on this case is really nice, I like how he etched in the graphics for the HDD activity, power, etc.
Another type of passive cooling that has been experimented with is to actually submerged the computer in a non-conductive liquid such as oil. Now that is really ballsy, perhaps we’ll take a look at one of those next…
Ben Heckendorn
www.benheck.com
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