Sips'Is there any hope trying to fixing this cooler?
wewbullIf the heat plate is damaged or any of those heat pipes are pinched / cracked, then you’re SOL. What a lot of people don’t realise is there’s liquid in those pipes that evaporates on the heat plate, condenses in the cooler, and then runs back to evaporate again.
Wait WHAT. I thought they were just pure copper/whatever heat conducting metal.
Nope. If they were they’d actually be a choke point in the heat transfer. You’d be better having the heat sink directly on the CPU rather than connecting it via 6-8 thin rods of metal.
Heat pipes are an amazing bit of tech that only made in to computing In the early 2000s. Without them we couldn’t have laptops in the way we do and air cooling would only be for the very lowest power desktop systems.