A new CPU cooler design based on an active cooling heatsink combined with heat pipes

The performance of active CPU cooling heatsinks primarily depends on the forced air convection created by computer fans. Boosting the fan speed, however, results in noise, vibration problems, and increased power consumption. The active heatsink, therefore, should be optimized under the constraints of overall volume, cost, and noise level. In this paper, a new CPU cooler is proposed that provides a more efficient heat dissipation capacity from the CPU to a finned heatsink without adding more heat pipes at a low-noise level of a small fan under the confined space constraints of a computer chassis. Computational fluid dynamics simulations were used to search for a proper cooling design. The simulation results were validated with corresponding physical experiments. The proposed CPU cooler has been shown to provide a total thermal resistance of 0.11-0.19 degrees C/W at a noise level of 21.5-36.3 dBA. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.