That seems like a good idea until you remember about hits and vibrations. Even with special supports for heatsinks.
Nah that one was a PCIe card and superduper well designed so it was VERY secure. Since it was mounted along the WHOLE gfx card, it actually made the card itself much sturdier as well. You would basically have to bend 2mm of solid aluminium as well as the PCB for that card to break, and that's before accounting for how the fin pattern was laid out both horizontally and vertically, adding even more strength.
OTOH, my current system uses a Noctua U14S, which is 935g with the 15cm fan, and it's pretty well mounted. Of course, it's a stationary PC, so not nearly as much movement and risk of jostling. Vibrations however comes mostly from fans, so once you remove the fans, no worries about that at all. Next most is from HDDs, and you can use dampening mounts for those(and generally should as it improves reliability for the HDD as well).
I was actually planning to use water cooling to make it environmentally sealed. To the point you can submerge it and only external ports and maybe cooling fans would fail.
Wow, yeah that would be a nice piece of work.
That's a lot more work, though. And lots more points of failure, namely the pump. I'd want to have a reserve pump for hot-swapping, then Peltie-based heat exchanger to run everything cooler when running from mains power, and so on...
In the end I looked at that overcomplicated plan and said: just no. The classic wind tunnel will have to do, it is also much cheaper.
Good choice. SANE choice!
My best idea, I think, was a heat exchanger aped from steam locomotive boiler: a long tube of hot water with tightly packed copper pipes running through it, a fan pumping air through these. With flows in opposing directions for better exchange.
Would be a female dog to make, though, and need to be the length of the entile computer, meaning I'd have to know the finished design to start making it.
Finding relevant formulas and making proper calculations without stupid mistakes would be hard as well. Would it be able to handle 250W max?
Dont forget that copper has poor ability to transfer heat to air. Also, blowing air through pipes works well if they're big enough, but the smaller the internal diameter, the more pressure you will need to push air through effectively.
I also think the "opposing directions" would add much less in effectiveness than they would add troublesome complexity.
Would probably be better off having a fan(s) blow from the underside and up through shorter such pipes.
There's also the lesser issue that the air in the pipes would be very poor at sucking up the heat radiated as IR.
Also, have you accounted for how the water density will change as temperature does? It's just 1-2% from 20C to 60C, but water is highly uncompressible, and as unlike a steam boiler you will need to have it all filled up, there will be a fair amount of strain on the design.
Actually, how about you just make a 2kg worth of aluminium to make a sort of classical style heatsink on the outside(edge?) of the laptop, and connect it with heatpipes? Vertically aligned fins to allow automatic airflow.
Not as radical, but definitely easier to make and less risk of missing something important.
And i think you can certainly make it handle 250W, just not sure how hard it will be to get that far. The "oversized classical aluminium" is definitely doable for that. 250W is twice that of my 6770 card, and it ran at 110W, with the GPU rarely going above 70C, meaning that the heatsink has to be cooler than that. When i tried putting fans blowing at it, i dropped it down around 50C, so even basic airflow on a big enough heatsink can get rid of a lot of heat.
I already have GTX 1060 and wish to save on that expense.
Of course. What i meant was that if it refuses to work without the extra power connection, full stop no way to change, you may be forced to consider it.
My current master plan is like this
Well that looks workable, although it's too long since i played around with electrics to give any guarantees.
Fun project either way!