Heatpipes: The Investigation Begins

Abit is so proud of their Silent OTES creation that it's a "patented heatpipe technology." With the US Patent & Trademark Office, Abit Computer Corporation had their patent approved back in June of 2004 for a "heat dissipating apparatus for circuit boards." In this patent they show diagrams of their OTES implementation for graphics cards. In this patent (US patent number: 6754077), it's stated: "The heat transfer tube is an advanced technique adopted on electronic devices. It is made from pure oxygen-free copper tubes and copper meshes filled with pure water or acetone as working fluid. The fluid at the heat receiving end is vaporized to a cooling end to be cooled and condensed to the fluid phase again."

We then turned to a second Abit motherboard with another Silent OTES heatpipe cooler. The video of it is available here. Clearly, not all heatpipes are made equal.

Last updated on October 29, 2007.