Coolermaster’s new TPC-812 goes beyond the heatpipes which we have all become familiar with and adds in vapour chambers as well.  The vapour chamber works similarly to a heatpipe but instead of heat only being able to travel away in one direction, the chamber allows heat to be dissipated in to directions.  Unfortunately in order to properly work it needs to remain quite small in size so while it can quickly spread out heat it needs help from something else to keep that heat moving away.  The cooler was fairly noisy when FrostyTech ran the fan at full speed but also offered among the most effective cooling performance and when they dialed the fan back its performance ended up in the middle of the pack but for someone using a moderately powerful CPU and wanting less noise it should move enough heat to remain effective.

"Vapour chambers and heatpipes work on the same principle, the difference is that vapour chambers are planar thermal devices that conduct heat in two dimensions. The two 19x3mm vapour chambers on the Coolermaster TPC-812 heatsink are double-stacked (one vapour chamber on top of three heatpipes), much like the Xigmatek Aegir. Since vapour chambers are planar devices this represents a more efficient application that piling tubular heatpipes on top of tubular heatpipes. Coolermaster’s TPC-812 is the first CPU heatsink to pass our test bench employing both vapour chambers and heatpipes in one package."

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