Does this all sound like “Chinese” to you? Well, we will assume that current heat sinks and, as a rule, how many they had on motherboards are a piece of aluminum that, through a thermal pad, passively dissipates heat into the air with which it was in contact. The most advanced heat sink had a heat pipe which improved heat transfer to an aluminum body which ultimately performed this function, but what Ineo has on the market is something else that from a technical and thermodynamic point of view is a real wonder.
Ineo ICE-COLD M.2 Pure Cooper, the future of the passive radiator?
It’s not that it’s an unknown technology as such, not even in the PC industry, since what Ineo used for its high-performance M.2 passive heatsink is nothing else. than the system which had the Nofan brand for CPU heat sinks.
But it’s taken to a new level where there are multiple pieces within the same heatsink that complement each other and trying to suppress the temperature of a component like an M.2 SSD is truly something never seen before. ‘now.
We will try to explain it in a simple way, because it has its crumb. The radiator is composed of 6 pieces or pieces that they are complementary and that one without the other could not fulfill the final function of dissipating heat, so it is a complete system as a concept.
We have a metal structure that will house part of the referenced parts and that takes care of the complete fixing of the system, where at the same time it also serves as a heat sink because it has a thermal pad installed just above where it will touch the ” hidden “or front side (as in you prefer to call) of the SSD once installed.
Then we have another thermal pad that touches the face of the M.2 SSD, something common at this point, but what this thermal pad will wear on top is a totally flat, rectangular copper cold plate, which doesn’t is more common.
Two-phase copper heatsink
Then this cold plate will be in contact with an aluminum heatsink that integrates four side projections with threads that will be those that are screwed to the first aluminum base and that supported the structure and its rigidity.
Well, this very particular aluminum heatsink has a few notches in the part of contact with the cold plate that at first glance you might think (and rightly so) that they will obviously interfere with the cooling. These notches run deep, for what they contain is the final magic of this Ineo ICE-COLD M.2 Pure Cooper.
We are talking about a copper tube which is not a heat pipe i.e. it does not carry liquid inside or any type of gas, it is just a copper tube which has been rotated and separated vertically with a greater height of the heat sink that incorporates its notches. This tube which achieves a very particular shape is integrated into the notches described forming a whole, an almost perfect contact surface (now) which will need thermal paste to come into contact with the cold plate.
The system is similar to that used by manufacturers of CPU coolers with Heat Pipe Direct Touch and an IHS processor, where copper meets nickel and thermal paste is required to improve heat transfer and fill imperfections generated in this system. .
Reverse convection system
What is interesting here is that since it is a simple and solid copper tube, it is here a question of using upside down what is called a tube bundle convection recuperator. . This logically requires as much copper as possible and also moving it away from the heat source instead of closer. For this reason, in the upper part of the copper tubes there is no heat sink other than a decorative plate with the name of the product and no other cold plate.
The objective is to create an exchange system with the gas (air) which minimizes the pressure drop of the latter due to the internal movement of the nearby fans, obtaining with this particular form that the total surface is the most large and with it the exchange capacity is maximized.
This is why heat pipes are not used, which reduces their cost and provides even better performance, because the heat dissipation capacity is higher. The brand assures us that we will be able to descend from 10 ºC to 25 ºC, something that will vary depending on internal cash flow. The only “bad” thing is that it is only available for form factor SSDs. M.2 2280Fortunately, all high-performance models are of this type, so there is no need to worry about this unless due to space requirements we have to use another form factor.
