NoFan CR-80EH & CS-60 Fanless Cooler & Case

[Lawrence Lee]

http://www.silentpcreview.com/NoFan_CR-80EH_CS-60/

[HammerSandwich]

How the heck does a heatpipe work in that arrangement? All that I've played with transport heat from 1 tip to the other, not across the diameter.

[xan_user]

Odd that a 'fanless' case has like a million fan mounting options.

[nagi]

How the heck does a heatpipe work in that arrangement? All that I've played with transport heat from 1 tip to the other, not across the diameter.

Think of it as a hundred heatpipes. AFAIK, heatpipes actually transport from the hotter to the cooler parts.

If the heatpipe could only transport from 1 tip to another, most heatpipe coolers would not work, as most heatpipes actually begin and end in the fin section, not at the base.

[Quartz]

(Delurk)

I've been using the Nofan CR-95 for two years now. Hardforum thread here. I remain thoroughly impressed.

I also tried the CR-80. I was thoroughly unimpressed. Of particular import is the poor mounting mechanism. The CR-80 simply isn't trustworthy for long-term use.

Quoting myself on Hardforum:

But my thoughts at the moment are that the mounting mechanism is particularly poor - notice the issue with the capacitors and the bare screws poking through the motherboard - and subject to thermal issues: on unmounting, I found that two of the plates wobbled. This indicates issues with thermal expansion and contraction - neither the screws nor the plates appear to be copper. Further, the cooling tubes on the CR-95 are much finer than those on the CR-80, and there are many more of them. The CR-95 is a premium product and it shows; the CR-80 is not, and it shows too.

Just to expand on the wobbly mounting plates, this appears to be because the plates and the CR-80 and the screws are made of different materials and have different coefficients of expansion. This means that when they become hot they expand at different rates. After a few cycles gaps develop.

Did you not see this problem, Lawrence?

While I have no experience of the CS-60 case, I recall rejecting the Nofan cases in 2013 because they are vertical towers - all the main heat-generating components (PSU, GPU, CPU) are stacked one above the other, and heat will rise from the lower to the higher. I selected the Silverstone FT02 instead because the components are rotated and so heat from each goes up and out and does not affect any of the others. The FT02 has the problem of poor access to the rear of the CPU, but I now have a FT05 and when my Titan X arrives, I'll be moving everything over.