Energy saving potential of using heat pipes for CPU cooling

Air cooling is the most common cooling solution for central processing units (CPUs). However, the heat dissipation capacity of conventional air-cooled heatsinks is limited because of non-uniform temperature distribution in the base of heatsinks. Embedded heat pipes into the heatsink is an effective method to improve the heat dissipation of the CPU and make the temperature distribution of the heatsink base more uniform. This work studied the cooling performance of the heat pipe embedded heatsinks, including the surface temperature, the average temperature of base, the thermal resistance and the power consumption. The impact of the different arrangements of heat pipes on the temperature distribution was also investigated. Results show that to obtain the same CPU temperature, a lower air velocity was needed for the heatsink with embedded heat pipe at the same heat flux. The minimum thermal resistance of the studied heat pipe embedded heatsinks was 0.15 degrees C/W, which is lower than that of the reference conventional heatsink, 0.22 degrees C/W. In addition, the heatsink with H-shape arrangement of embedded heat pipes had the best overall performance, which cooling capacity was increased by 22.5% and the weight of the heatsink was reduced by 30.1% compared with the heatsink without heat pipes. The energy saving potential was also evaluated based on the measured real operating status of CPUs. The dynamic simulation results show that the total fan power consumption can be effectively reduced when using a heat pipe embedded heatsink to replace the conventional heatsink, which can be up to 66.2%.