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.
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As long as the heat pipes don’t leak it should still work.
I don’t have any suggestions, but I just wanted to say that it’s really cool that you’re trying to save things from becoming waste. If you manage to fix it, it’s win-win.
Put it on the hood of your car
Cool car
Fix it? Be a lot cooler if you did.
Beat me to it lol
Dang haven’t seen this one in a few years
You should ask Noctua what they think, they have splendid customer support.
I would keep it as an involuntary art piece.
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.
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.
just bend the rest of your pc until the cooler fits, easy
It’s possible, and if you do it right there shouldn’t be too much structural damage that would affect conductivity. It’s a lot of work though.
As long as the plate is even and clean, mounting is not bent, you should be fine.
If the mounting plate is not OK, be careful - - you could damage the mobo and cpu.
Good coolers are not that expensive. I’d write this one off, personally.
I see two ways forward: either you’re risk averse and assume internal damages that will highly influence heat transfer or you trust in the automatic protection mechanisms or your CPU.
Personally I’d toss it but I’m old and I’ve burned more than one CPU back in the days with faulty or wrongly installed coolers.
I don’t think that the risk is high nowadays but I’m (literally) burned in that regard.
I’m not even sure it would survive bending back so perhaps try that first and if it breaks completely you don’t even have a decision on your hand :)
CPU thermal protection is pretty solid nowadays. I’m also old, and I too remember Athlons you could actually cook on, but in my general experience I’ve found they did learn from that and the thermal protections are not exactly a complex system. It’s basically math, as far as calculating how much power is going in to how quickly it can heat up to where the thermal sensor is placed, and they simply shut it down before it’s mathematically possible for the heat to reach a damaging level. It’s very hard now to actually destroy a CPU due to internal overheating, at least any of the ones I’ve had various “incidents” with. They aggressively throttle down and shut down and are perfectly fine once properly cooled.
I once customized a heat pipe for a tiny case. You can bend heat pipes around and they’ll still work as long as you don’t get a kink (pipe bent such that it flattens).
Unless you can’t seat it flush against the CPU, I don’t even see a problem. It’s a metal heatsink. The piping being bent shouldn’t affect its ability to transfer heat and the fins look fine. 🤷♂️
You could put the bottom part in a vise carefully and try bending the pipes back the way they go. Wouldn’t have to be perfect as long as the base is in good form. Heatsink fins could be straightened with a butter knife
Not sure if needed, but heating it while bending may be beneficial as well
If you get it hot enough to make the metal easier to bend, it could be hot enough to bork the heat pipes
No expert on CPUs and coolers, but
- begin by checking levelness of the plate and functionality of the mounting mechanism. I suspect that if they got badly warped, all work could be futile.
- when trying to bend things back, apply some external heat to them first (duh) [edit: dubious, see another user’s comment below] and pay care not to impair the levelness of the plate (duh)
- personally I would only try it on a CPU and motherboard that are old and cheap enough for me to be okay with them breaking. If you don’t have them, perhaps there’s some PC re-use initiative in your vicinity which would either accept and try your cooler, or give out corresponding components to you.
This an assembly specifically designed to spread out heat, applying heat to the pipes will just make the whole thing hot. If you did take a giant blowtorch to it and got it hot enough to soften the pipes, you’d probably dry out the pipes (potentially explosively).
Heat pipes are cold worked in the factory. The metals chosen are ductile. Adding lots of heat will only add to the problems.
