Long story short; I bought a pc from a second hand market. It got completely destroyed during shipping. It got covered so no worries there, but im still left with some broken parts I'd like to fix. Among them is this Noctua cooler. This has been heavily bent, is it safe to bend it back again or is it going to require a lot of heat?
Thanks for any suggestions!
UPDATE :
Getting close! Surprisingly easy to vend back fix sone very slowly. Hoping to test it soon.
If 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.
this is the right answer, also for me this question depends on the processor you are fitting this cooler with, if it's a high end i9/RYzen 9 xxxxK or some i7/Ryzen 7 xxxxK maybe some efficiency lost is gonna be a problem in any case you need to do some heat test with furmark or any software that stress the cpu
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.
Heat pipes look fine from the angle shown. My main concern would be the connection from the heat pipes to the cold plate. Looks like there was enough torque to potentially break them free.