Passive Cooling Gets Taken to the Extreme With a 4kg Chunk of Copper

Whether you utilised an air cooler, AIO solution, or perhaps even a custom-loop setup, cooling methodologies within PC designs are, typically speaking, fairly uniform in their overall concept and application. – While there are, of course, passive cooling options (such as the Noctua NH-P1), however, they typically don’t tend to get utilised that often, or more accurately, generally only within certain scenarios.

Following a Reddit post by ‘u/That-Desktop-User‘ it seems that there is a new alternative you possibly may not have considered before. Namely, a circa 4kg chunk of copper! – Yep, that’s pretty much it!

A chunk of Copper Gets Utilised as a Passive Cooling Solution!

Now, while this is certainly a unique setup it is one which I’d heavily recommend against you trying. In theory, this does have the potential to actually legitimately work as a passive cooling solution and the user does seem to report some fairly favourable temperatures with it achieving (or at least them claiming) just 35°C at idle and 80°C at load (with an Intel i9 processor no less!).

With that being said, however, there is a pretty hefty caveat to this claim. Namely, it was only run for 15 minutes at a time, and, as I’m sure some of you are aware, passive cooling solutions can generally only provide solid results during short-term operation. Well, more accurately, those that aren’t supported in some way by an airflow source (such as within a PC case with intake and exhaust fans).

Put simply, as that chunk of copper starts to fully dissipate the heat, say over the course of 1-2 hours, I would expect a temperature-controlling shutdown to happen sooner or later. Maybe not if it’s kept idle, but almost certainly at load! – On the plus side though, a KG of raw copper currently costs around £5 in the UK right now, so you could have a pretty unique talking point here for just £20. – For that kind of money though, I still think I’d rather have something like the CoolerMaster Hyper.

What do you think though? – Let us know in the comments!