Copper is actually ~25-250X leas efficient at transferring heat than a heat pipe and convection is hundreds of times more efficient than radiation at transferring heat and the fins on a heat sink would have hundreds of times less surface area for dissipating heat all that is to say this might work but it would be orders of magnitude less efficient than a standard heat sink.

But without this ridiculous heatsink, we never would have gotten the most perfectly nerdy Lemmy post.

And to give it credit, I think this design wins for how much heat you can sink into the heatsink itself before you need somewhere else to put it!

It might? The only thing is that Heat pipes still transfer heat faster than copper and the air from the fan moves the heat faster than it travels through the copper, the only question is is that enough faster to make up for the speed it takes to transfer the heat from the fins into the air that is all technically radiative and thus slow but it’s only hundreds of times slower and as I already said the heat sink would be orders of magnitude faster so I doubt it.