What prevent Vapor Chamber Widely Used In Laptop Applications
Nowadays, more and more mobile phones begin to have built-in VC heatsink, which solves the problem that SOC chips are easy to overheat to a certain extent. However, for the notebook field that pays more attention to heat dissipation, why is it mainly based on heat pipes, which is far from the popularity of vapor chamber?
Power consumption difference between notebook and mobile phone:
The heat source of smart phones and notebooks comes from processors. The power consumption of mobile phone processors (such as the new snapdragon 8) at full load is abouy 8W; The heat source of the notebook is not only the processor, but also the independent graphics card, which is much more powerful than the mobile phone. In other words, the requirements of notebook for heat dissipation design are much higher than those of smart phones. As a more professional productivity and game platform, if the notebook encounters overheating and frequency reduction, it will seriously affect the operating experience.
Why laptop still mainly used heatpipe:
The thermal module of notebook is usually composed of three parts: heat pipe, fin and fan. Of course, the heat sink covering the chip surface, and the heat conducting medium between the heat sink and the chip surface are also very important. Subject to the size and thickness of the fuselage, the light and thin book is equipped with up to 2 cooling air outlets (located on the screen shaft) + 2 sets of cooling fins +2 fans; High end game books can be equipped with up to 4 cooling vents +4 groups of cooling fins +4 fans. In a relatively limited internal space, installing as many cooling components as possible is a relatively complex system engineering. When there is a large heat dissipation pressure on a part of the notebook, adding an additional (or thickened) heat pipe, replacing it with a higher speed fan and increasing the area of the heat dissipation fins can generally be solved, so the cost is relatively lower.
The cost of vapor chamber:
Both are the media used to conduct heat. We all know that VC is better than heat pipe. But for laptop thermal design, there are many protruding capacitors, inductors and other components on the motherboard in addition to processors and graphics chips. To cover a whole vapor chamber to them, its shape and thickness curve need to be customized, and the cost is much higher than that of directly using general-purpose heat pipe. In addition, to give full play to the full strength of VC heatsink, it needs a larger surface area and superimposed with fans with larger air volume (more), otherwise the actual heat conduction efficiency is not much better than that of traditional heat pipes.
However, compared with heat pipes, the upper limit of thermal conductivity efficiency of VC is indeed on the superposition of more heat pipes, and the coverage of a whole VC heatsink can also make the internal design of notebook look cleaner. However, the consequent customization costs need more premium for notebooks to be wiped out. At this stage, notebooks that use traditional heat pipe cooling modules and are much cheaper are often the first choice for consumers.
At present, OEM manufacturers do not need to invest more customization costs to use VC heatsinks in the environment where heat pipes are enough. Vapor Chamber cooling is still in the stage of small-scale use in the notebook field, and its practicality is not proportional to the subsequent cost. With the continuous improvement of manufacturing technology, Vapor Chamber heatsink will be more and more widely used in notebook computers.
