Cutting Open a Heatsink Heatpipe to See Inside - Z

An anonymous reader writes: Frostytech gets to the heart of Zalman's CNPS11X heatsink by cutting a section of heatpipe from the CPU cooler to inspect its inner composite heatpipe wick structure. Now THATs an in-depth heatsink review! Interesting photos of the dissected heatpipe's composite wick — sintered copper powder on top and axial groove wick below — that you're unlikely to see elsewhere. In the late 1960's the first commercial heatpipes were used by NASA to stabilize satellite temperatures, now they stabilize multi-core processors.