I have recently switched from an x99 + i7 5820K system to a Z370 + i7 8700K. I found the lack of good cooling options frustrating, as I understand many others do. With socket 2011, the standard cooler recommended here and elsewhere seems to be the Dynatron T318 heatsink, plus a fan of your choice. The T318 is a full-copper vapor chamber cooler, specified for up to 165W TDP. That's with server rack airflow, but even with tolerable noise levels this heatsink has pretty decent cooling abilities. For those not familiar with them, vapor chambers work on the same principle as heatpipes, but instead of transporting heat from one end to the other, they spread out heat across their opposite surface area. My layperson's understanding is that for space constrained applications, vapor chambers are sometimes better than heatpipes, as you don't have far to go anyway, and vapor chambers are great at spreading out your waste heat as evenly and efficiently as possible across whatever small heatsink you can fit in. Aside from select socket 2011 server heatsinks, vapor chambers are also used in some GPUs, especially reference blower models. That's 200, 300W of excess heat cooled by heatsinks no bigger than an L9i or C7.
So you would think a similar solution would be amazing for the relatively modest 95ish W TDP you get with most top-end socket 115x CPUs. Alas, I've looked everywhere from eBay to Digikey to Taobao, and I couldn't find a single vapor chamber cooler for socket 115x. I'm not quite sure why - might be that there's space constraints that make it infeasible in general, or maybe vapor chambers are too expensive to be worth it for relatively small cooling requirements. (Or maybe I'm misunderstanding the physics and engineering of theis, and vapor chambers are just not appropriate for this?)
Coming up empty, I decided to take matters into my own hand. After all, I still had the T318 lying around anyway, so why not try and see if I coud make it fit?
First, the T318, as well as presumably its square sibling, the R15, work, sort of. They both have a flat base, meaning that unless your mainboard has an exceptionally large area around the socket clear of any components that protrude farther than the top of the CPU, they won't fit directly. Still, on my board, nothing stuck out more than a milimeter or so above the CPU, so I could get the T318 to make contact via a copper shim. I left this approach at that stage as I didn't like the copper shim too much.
What I ended up with ultimately though is a heatsink from a GPU. That one has a square-shaped elevation of roughly 46x46mm on the base to make contact with the GPU die, which also fits pretty well for a cpu. That elevation is about 2.7mm from the rest of the base of the vapor chamber, so on my board the entire heatsink was clear of any other components without any shims. The heatsink has mounting holes with 58.4mm spacing, so I 3D-printed an adapter to fix it to the LGA 115x 75mm-spaced mounting holes, then attached a Noctua A9x14 on top.
I'm attaching pictures if people are interested. (Don't mind my DIY M.2 heatsink...)
I'm curious to hear what people think of the idea. I don't have another cooler to do temperature comparisons with, but just as some sort of reference, my stock 8700K sits at around 41 degrees at idle, with the fan at an inaudible 860rpm.
So you would think a similar solution would be amazing for the relatively modest 95ish W TDP you get with most top-end socket 115x CPUs. Alas, I've looked everywhere from eBay to Digikey to Taobao, and I couldn't find a single vapor chamber cooler for socket 115x. I'm not quite sure why - might be that there's space constraints that make it infeasible in general, or maybe vapor chambers are too expensive to be worth it for relatively small cooling requirements. (Or maybe I'm misunderstanding the physics and engineering of theis, and vapor chambers are just not appropriate for this?)
Coming up empty, I decided to take matters into my own hand. After all, I still had the T318 lying around anyway, so why not try and see if I coud make it fit?
First, the T318, as well as presumably its square sibling, the R15, work, sort of. They both have a flat base, meaning that unless your mainboard has an exceptionally large area around the socket clear of any components that protrude farther than the top of the CPU, they won't fit directly. Still, on my board, nothing stuck out more than a milimeter or so above the CPU, so I could get the T318 to make contact via a copper shim. I left this approach at that stage as I didn't like the copper shim too much.
What I ended up with ultimately though is a heatsink from a GPU. That one has a square-shaped elevation of roughly 46x46mm on the base to make contact with the GPU die, which also fits pretty well for a cpu. That elevation is about 2.7mm from the rest of the base of the vapor chamber, so on my board the entire heatsink was clear of any other components without any shims. The heatsink has mounting holes with 58.4mm spacing, so I 3D-printed an adapter to fix it to the LGA 115x 75mm-spaced mounting holes, then attached a Noctua A9x14 on top.
I'm attaching pictures if people are interested. (Don't mind my DIY M.2 heatsink...)
I'm curious to hear what people think of the idea. I don't have another cooler to do temperature comparisons with, but just as some sort of reference, my stock 8700K sits at around 41 degrees at idle, with the fan at an inaudible 860rpm.
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