Vapor chamber in high-end VGA card

Abstract

The vapor chamber has been verified the excellent heat transfer efficiency and heat spreading performance utilized particularly in many high-power and small area heat sources. This paper analyzes and compares the thermal performance of a vapor chamber-based thermal module with a traditional Cu metal based plate embedded three heat pipes of 6 mm diameter at high heat flux GPU above 165 Watt. They are estimated and simulated the optimum fin design of aluminum heat sink through computational numerical method and thermal resistance analysis at constant P-Q performance curve of a same commercial blower. These results show that the total thermal resistance value of vapor chamber-based thermal module are under 0.273 °C/W from simulation analytical data and that of heat-pipes and copper based plate thermal module are all over 0.273 °C/W. Therefore, the thermal performance of vapor chamber-based thermal module can be accurately simulated and analyzed by applying the method introduced in this paper. The vapor chamber-based thermal module can achieve the optimum thermal performance and the critical heat flux may exceed 100 Watt/cm2. Consequently, the vapor chamber-based thermal module introduced in this paper is able to cope with future GPU named RV 970 and GTX 590 with high heat flux of more than 60 Watt/cm2.