Copper Coin Cooling.

[abhigyan001]

I saw this post on a website ( http://www.sciencealert.com/stop-your-computer-overheating-by-stacking-copper-coins-on-it ) where a guy cools computer components with copper coins.

 

I wanna know if this works. Maybe a Workshop Video on this would do great where Luke (the workshop guy) tries out cooling laptops by keeping copper coins on top also with stuff like network cards where there is no fan on heatsink.

[abhigyan001]

Before anybody tells me to try this out myself, We don't have copper coins.

[IMPERIUS]

bullshit. while the theory is correct, that the heat from the pc goes onto the coins is true, that's the principle on which air cpu coolers are based on. I doubt that just putting coins on your laptop will make a difference however

[abhigyan001]

2 minutes ago, IMPERIUS said:

bullshit. while the theory is correct, that the heat from the pc goes onto the coins is true, that's the principle on which air cpu coolers are based on. I doubt that just putting coins on your laptop will make a difference however

But isn't it worth a try?

[FilipSebik]

1 hour ago, abhigyan001 said:

But isn't it worth a try?

It is worth to try it and then tell us results

[IMPERIUS]

1 minute ago, abhigyan001 said:

But isn't it worth a try?

if you have coins laying around, why not, gotta try it for yourself to know for sure.

I think that yes, the coins will heat up but that won't make the laptop any cooler. Its just an after effect of the coins being near a hot object.

[abhigyan001]

1 minute ago, IMPERIUS said:

if you have coins laying around, why not, gotta try it for yourself to know for sure.

I think that yes, the coins will heat up but that won't make the laptop any cooler. Its just an after effect of the coins being near a hot object.

As I mentioned we dont use copper coins in my country, just steel (or nickel) 

[IMPERIUS]

2 minutes ago, abhigyan001 said:

As I mentioned we dont use copper coins in my country, just steel (or nickel) 

yea, copper would be the ideal metal for this since it has high thermal conductivity

[Heesleemer]

the coins will just get hot from the exhaust air, the frame/laptop casing is not a heatsink

[Coaxialgamer]

BS.  A few coins simply don't have the thermal capacity for a laptop that can produce like 40w of heat under load.  Not to mention they don't have the surface area to cool fast enough. 

[WereCat]

You would need to stack the coins on the CPU/GPU die and also use some thermal paste.

 

Placing it on chassis makes no difference for the hardware temperature. Yes, you are transferring heat from chassis on the coins but chassis is warmed by hot air and not by transferring heat on itself from the die. And even if it would the thermal conductivity would be very poor and it would barely make a difference.

 

So in theory this could possibly work only on laptops with passive cooling partially made with aluminium chassis... the results would be very poor imo.

Linus did this with submerging Macbook into water but you get far better results with water because it was covering entire bottom of the chassis and made great contact with it.

[QueenDemetria]

Putting coins on a laptop won't help its cooling, its just fundamentally wrong. Wedging coins in a heatsink though, if done right it can help(but if you have space to fit coins, you should really just use a better heatsink).

[Fetzie]

3 minutes ago, QueenDemetria said:

Putting coins on a laptop won't help its cooling, its just fundamentally wrong. Wedging coins in a heatsink though, if done right it can help(but if you have space to fit coins, you should really just use a better heatsink).

If you actively cool the coins it could. But then you could just have a fan blowing cool air into the laptop which would be vastly more effective as the puny little fans in laptops are shite at doing their job.

[RollinLower]

this will only help if the coins are in direct contact with the heat source, like in the picture of the card with the coins on it, the pic with the stacks of coins on a macbook is probbaly just BS.  they will only transfer the heat from the case, not from the hot components. it is true however that in more modern laptops the aluminium casing is used as some sort of a heatsink, but you would need a aluminium laptop for that, which are fairly uncommon. 

[WkdPaul]

3 hours ago, QueenDemetria said:

Putting coins on a laptop won't help its cooling, its just fundamentally wrong. Wedging coins in a heatsink though, if done right it can help(but if you have space to fit coins, you should really just use a better heatsink).

it's not "fundamentally wrong", it will transfer the heat to the coins, the problem here is that the coins are becoming a "passive heatsink" if you will, since there aren't any way to take the "heat out of the coins" it just means it's gonna take longer for the macbook to thermal throttle (the coins are gonna soak the heat and as soon as you get "equilibrium" you're back to step 1).

 

 

Linus used the same principle using water;

 

[harrynowl]

I did it on a raspberry pi.

[Little Bear]

The coins would simply be working as heat spreaders. Also if you wanted to try this, and you are in the United States you need to get pennies before 1982 to get a decent amount of copper. Albeit the science that proves this true there would not be a substantial cooling benefit considering the lack of surface area. On top of all of this, who wants copper coins lying abruptly on your laptop?

[WkdPaul]

14 minutes ago, Little Bear said:

*snip*

On top of all of this, who wants copper coins lying abruptly on your laptop?

It's worth mentioning that if you need to do this then obviously the laptop wasn't well designed, at all...

[QueenDemetria]

2 hours ago, wkdpaul said:

it's not "fundamentally wrong", it will transfer the heat to the coins, the problem here is that the coins are becoming a "passive heatsink" if you will, since there aren't any way to take the "heat out of the coins" it just means it's gonna take longer for the macbook to thermal throttle (the coins are gonna soak the heat and as soon as you get "equilibrium" you're back to step 1).

 

Linus used the same principle using water

In theory, but stacking coins on the laptop casing is probably the least effective way of removing heat. Placing coins on the top of a laptop is like putting a big heatsink on a cars bonnet to keep the engine cool, basically it won't do jack shit. There is poor thermal conductivity between the casing and coins(and even between each coin) so that is problem 1, and problem 2 is that there is poor thermal conductivity between the casing of the laptop and the components that are creating heat, since laptops are designed to be 'cool to the touch' while managing the internal thermals(of course, older MacBooks were usually hot externally so for these I could probably let this slide). Unless if a laptop uses the casing as a heatsink(like the 2015 MacBook), all you would be doing is removing the residual heat, which if the method is passive barely anything will actually be achieved, but even if it you made the outside cool to the touch(via a active cooled heatsink or whatever), the inside temps could still be warm-hot(just like a HotPocket. Cool on the outside, blistering on the inside.). There is so much wrong with this, conductivity and surface area being my main concerns(and this is completely ignoring practicality), which is why stacking coins on a laptop to cool it down won't be very effective. 

[NotMC]

I tried it - and while just stacking them simply led to the coins getting hot before the rest of the Laptop (in the end both the couns and the laptop were hot) I had the absolutely ingenious idea to regularly dump the hot copper coins - which did indeed suck in heat from the hot laptop quickly at first, only to then retain that heat - into a bowl of water. Then fish the now cool coins out, put them in a towel to dry roughly for a moment and finally put them on top of the laptop again to suck out more heat.

The heat is used up when the water gets a little warmer because copper loses heat fast in water. By repeating this process each time the coins become about as warm as the rest of the laptop is, then lose that excess heat in water, resulting in the laptop becoming a bit cooler. This is not that useful most of the time since it takes frequent effort, but it can be useful in summer when you don't have air conditioning and don't want to melt your laptop - or yourself.

Just leaving the coins on top of the laptop (on the line that gets hot easily on that line in front of the screen) is not useful because copper to air transfer of heat isn't efficient at all. Unlike copper to water (which is instantly effective!)

[danalog]

Talk about a dead thread..... 

Well, since it's been revived I will say, for troubleshooting sometimes I use tiny heatsinks on CPUs just to see if they're getting warm if a PC isn't powering on. Like, a chipset heatsink etc. And that often can barely handle a 65w CPU in the BIOS. So, coins won't be much better since that's even less surface area.

[Beerzerker]

Not efficient at all due to a few reasons.
Biggest is look at a coin, any coin and tell me with the stamping/image how it's making good contact across it's surface to what needs to be cooled.
The coin itself would have to be flat at least to the side going down on what needs to be cooled. 

There is also a question of mass involved for absorbing and moving heat along, a single coin will become thermally saturated almost instantly and remain that way as long as it's being heated. It must be able to pass heat along and to atmosphere at least as quickly as the heat is coming to it but thing is, if there is only a small amount of mass present to absorb the energy, it will not pickup alot of the heat to move along making the item to be cooled build heat.

That's why coolers always have a measured amount of metal/mass in the first place.
Takes mass to absorb a given amount of energy and to pass it along.

Heatpipe coolers are a newer way of moving heat and takes advantage of the wicking effect heat has with a liquid but even that counts as mass to move heat along.
You'd need alot of coins for it to become efficient enough to do the job.....
Then you must have ALL these coins flat on both sides so they make good contact with each other as part of the thermal chain or efficiency goes away.

Your cooling will only be as good as the weakest link in this thermal chain for passing heat along, from the core itself to the chip's lid, to the TIM, to the base of the heatsink/block, to the fins/heat pipes and finally released to atmosphere.

Think about all that for a sec and you'll get it.

[Guest]

I lapped a Morgan Silver Dollar once. 

 

Page 5, post #97

 

https://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/showthread.php?t=343346&page=5

 

Jesus that was a long time ago now. Almost forgot all about that!

[Beerzerker]

22 minutes ago, Guest 5150 said:

I lapped a Morgan Silver Dollar once. 

 

Page 5, post #97

 

https://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/showthread.php?t=343346&page=5

 

Jesus that was a long time ago now. Almost forgot all about that!

Yep - Had to lap it for the coin to work properly but it did work.
You had some nice reults from it too but since it was silver, that figures right?

[Guest]

Just now, Beerzerker said:

Yep - Had to lap it for the coin to work properly but it did work.
You had some nice reults from it too but since it was silver, that figures right?

I figure a copper coin is no different than a copper plate (IHS) and would only be different in shape and perhaps mass quantity depending on thickness and so forth.

 

Results where decent. A few degree cooler than the IHS plate, but nothing overwhelming. But definitely was traded for the IHS plate, so the CPU was de-lidded obviously. I didn't stack coins or anything.