An air-cooled GPU sprung a liquid leak!

[Peter_Brosdahl]

Hi, all,

Putting this here for now. Not quite enough meat to be a story for us yet but, nonetheless, an interesting piece. Evidently, someone has an MSI Ventus 2080 that was spiking in temps(upwards of 85c!) and when it was torn apart they found a heat pipe that had corroded and was leaking liquid onto the GPU itself. They've contact MSI who has said it is not aware of such a situation and is now looking into it.

This GPU has sprung a leak! - KitGuru

Today’s video is a quick one from me, reaching out to the community for your opinion and thoughts on

www.kitguru.net

This GPU has sprung a leak!

Today we have something unusual to cover, and it all started with one of our friends brought James a card to look at. The MSI RTX 2080 Ventus OC - we found out the…

vimeo.com

 

[Dan_D]

Heat pipes can burst and sometimes the CLC's leak too. Mostly because the corrosion inhibitor in the coolant didn't do its job.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

Heat pipes can burst and sometimes the CLC's leak too. Mostly because the corrosion inhibitor in the coolant didn't do its job.

I never knew that was a thing. I admit, never really looked into exactly what is in a heat pipe. A part of me wondered the liquid they saw was some kind of condensation.

 

[Dan_D]

It's pretty rare but it does happen. Usually when the cooler is overwhelmed and the fluid in the heat pipe turns into gas without cooling and turning back into a liquid. Pressure builds up inside the pipe to a point where it bursts.

 

[Brian_B]

Heat pipes are indeed pipes. They do indeed contain a small bit of liquid - almost always water with a bit of corrosion inhibitor of some sort, as Dan_D mentions, usually with the internal heat pipe pressure set at a vacuum relative to atmosphere. It isn't much - heat pipes typically aren't very large to begin with, and they aren't packed full of water - just a few drops of water. Most of the time if one sprung a leak you'd probably not even notice (other than your heatsink would just start to suck at cooling).

The water boils at the hot end, and re-condenses at the fins and wicks back down to be a pretty nifty closed loop. Since it's at a vacuum, this occurs at some temperature less than 100C, and can be adjusted based on what vacuum you manufacture the pipes at. Since the internal volume of the pipe is so small, gravity doesn't even play a huge role - the surface tension of the water is enough to make it play nicely most of the time.

Water is an amazing liquid.

 

[DrezKill]

I never knew that was a thing. I admit, never really looked into exactly what is in a heat pipe. A part of me wondered the liquid they saw was some kind of condensation.

 

[Riccochet]

I can't imagine that a burst heat pipe has enough liquid in it to deposit on anything. I've cut one open before and there was no free flowing liquid in it. Just the inside of the pipe was wet.