949
Copper
(thelemmy.club)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

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Was intrigued, so made a simulation to figure it out.
TLDR: 592.2 seconds, or 9 minutes and 52.2 seconds. Very similar to the other comment - it appears temperature differentials and heat loss to the air have opposite effects on thermal throttle time and mostly cancel themselves out. For the most part, heat transfer and heat loss appear to affect the thermal throttle time less than the sheer heat mass of the block by several multiples
Assumptions:
Modeling conditions:
Fun facts I found from playing around with the model:
Well goddamn... Ok. Go ahead and dm me your home address, phone number, social and/or tax id number, the name of the street you grew up on, the name of your favorite teacher, the IMEI number of your cellphone, a high resolution set of your fingerprints, and a list of your three greatest fears, and I'll get your sticker sent over as soon as I can.
Respect for taking the time to model that. Goes to show why heat sinks look the way they do, and not just big lumps of metal lol
You did the monster math.
Respect.
Numerical methods is cheating! Real men use PDE's!
/s of course, though I was kinda hoping you'd use PDE's
See, I thought about doing that, but then I realized: I don't actually want to do that
What software did you use to model this, btw?
Python
How long a copper block do I need to prevent any throttle?
Good question. I had to modify my code to run more efficiently, since not throttling implies that the copper block reaches a steady state with very little temperature changes over time.
But, with the changes, I can say that there is no copper block length that would prevent throttling with a 120 W CPU. It seems the heat transfer within the block is slow enough over such long lengths that you get diminishing returns with longer and longer copper blocks. Here's a graph I made summarizing the different block lengths that I tested
With a 65 W CPU, a 32 cm (double the original length) copper block is sufficient to prevent throttling, but it'll reach steady state at 97 C
Have you considered the possibility that Ea-nāṣir might have been delivering inferior quality copper to you?
Ea-nasir promised that these were good quality copper, and I do not have any reason to suspect otherwise. But I'll have you know, if the copper is of inferior quality, I will make sure to send my messenger to complain. He will not hear the end of it!
Would the result change if the copper block gets wider instead of higher?
Apparently, yes. You can prevent thermal throttling if you expanded the base from 4 cm x 4 cm to 4.5 cm x 4.5 cm, and if you increased the height from 16 cm to 100 cm. The temperature caps at around 97 C.
Did the model include some air movement by way of the fans on the case. That would be a fun thing to think about.
The fact that the air remains a constant temperature means the model is assuming infinite airflow.
It didn't model convection at all.