German overclocker Roman Hartung, also known as der8auer, recently took it upon himself to see if an old myth of PC building and CPU cooling actually works: dissipating heat by way of a chimney-style heatsink. To that end, he actually built a really tall heatsink.
To be precise, the myth isn’t anything new and is based on the laws of physics: heat causes hot air to rise, but hot air undirected rises in any available space. Through a chimney, that hot air is redirected and funneled upwards, while also dragging cool air upwards from the bottom. The scientific term for this is called convection.
der8auer’s final result was a metre-tall CPU cooler, albeit assembled in segments. In terms of practicality, let’s put that to rest: no, this build would not fit into normal casing, in any way, shape, or form.
According to der8auer’s mathematics, the chimney-style heatsink stands at 110cm tall, nearly reaching his ceiling. Oh, and the CPU he used in his experiment is an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and there are no fans attached the project.
The end result from der8auer’s experiment was a drop of 19Β°C, the 9800X3D going from 90Β°C to 71Β°C, and again, that was with no fans expediting the process. Ultimately, though, der8auer himself concludes that using fans are still the more sensible form of cooling, but at the very least, he’s busted the myth of chimney-style cooling.
This isn’t the first project der8auer has compelled himself into doing. Prior to this, he modified an MSI Lighting Z RTX 5090, which is an AIO-cooled variant of the GPU that also costs US$7,000 (~RM28,647), with his own custom waterblock. The end result was a drop of 11Β°C, from 64Β°C to 53Β°C, but that drop also comes with an equally heavy cost in the customisation. By his rough estimate, the modifications alone would’ve cost US$8,000 (~RM32,740).