4d ago

Is there any hope trying to fixing this cooler?

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.

29 comments

- Dang haven't seen this one in a few years
- Beat me to it lol

Fix it? Be a lot cooler if you did.

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.
- 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.
- 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

just bend the rest of your pc until the cooler fits, easy
- Or do a Salvador Dali themed build

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.

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-win.

As long as the heat pipes don't leak it should still work.

Good coolers are not that expensive. I'd write this one off, personally.

You should ask Noctua what they think, they have splendid customer support.
I would keep it as an involuntary art piece.

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.

Put it on the hood of your car
- Cool car

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

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. 🤷‍♂️

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.

Cool spider sculpture!

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).

Yeah you could bend the top part back into place, it's just that with heat, it would make the process easier. Heat gun or blow torch would work, I'm all for trying to repair things rather than tossing it out.

29 comments