Dave W. Plummer, a well-known figure in the field of Windows development, recently demonstrated an ingenious cooling solution for the AMD Threadripper motherboard chipset - he placed a small Stirling engine on the chipset heat sink and used waste heat to drive it.
In the demonstration, after Plummer manually turned the flywheel to start the engine, the heat generated by the chipset was enough to keep the Stirling engine running and convert thermal energy into mechanical energy. This "Sunnytech low-temperature Stirling engine", which sells for about $40 (currently with a $10 coupon), is essentially an educational model toy. It is said that it can reach a rotation speed of about 200 RPM when placed on a hot coffee cup at 20°C. Some users even reported that it can be driven by the temperature of their palms alone.
Patented by Robert Stirling in 1816, the Stirling engine was initially positioned as a safer alternative to steam boilers at the time and had some applications in water pumps and domestic applications. Today, the technology still plays a role in solar power generation, combined heat and power, cryogenic refrigeration and submarines.
Its working principle is: the heat source heats the gas in the cylinder to expand, pushing the piston to drive the flywheel to rotate; then the gas cools and shrinks, and the flywheel continues to rotate based on inertia to complete the cycle, and so on to achieve the conversion of thermal energy into mechanical energy. This process is a closed cycle, and the working gas is not exchanged externally.
Plummer noted that its test configuration was an AMD Threadripper 3970X with 32 cores and 64 threads. However, he did not publish the temperature change data of the chipset before and after installing the Stirling engine, nor did he explain whether this "modification" had an impact on the running scores. Some netizens joked that this may be the most "elegant" passive cooling solution in history.