Cooler Master to Use ‘Horizontal Vapor Chambers’ in Future CPU Coolers

In our notebooks and on top of the processors on our graphics cards, Vapor Chamber cooling technology is not too rare. But with desktop CPU coolers, it’s not only rare, but non-existent (to our knowledge). That is until now, of course, as Cooler Master has just announced its plans to begin releasing CPU coolers that utilize a “Horizontal Vapor Chamber”.

Vapor Chambers work in a similar manner as heatpipes, but rather than having a tubular (dude!) design, they’re flat, a few millimeters thick, and sit right atop the processor. As heat is generated, liquid inside the Vapor Chamber efficiently spreads throughout the entire surface area, as evenly as possible. This helps reduce hot spots, as Cooler Master’s image below shows:

The size of the Vapor Chamber under the cooler on the right is highly exaggerated, but it gets the point across. The idea is that instead of one heatpipe dealing with more heat than the others, they’ll all deal with the same workload, if you will, resulting in cooler temperatures overall.

In another image (seen at the URL below), the company claims that with the introduction of a Horizontal Vapor Chamber, fans can be run at lower speeds while retaining the same CPU temperature. So for example, if a CPU is running at 50°C (my example) and its fan operates at 40dBA, the addition of a Vapor Chamber could retain the same temperature while able to run the fan at 28dBA.

It all looks great on paper, but what we hope happens is that CM releases a Horizontal Vapor Chamber design based on an already-released cooler, so that both can be directly compared. After all, these claims are rather stark, so it’d be nice to see proof of the results.