Windows guru uses 19th-century Stirling Engine tech for auxiliary cooling on AMD Threadripper 3970X system — waste heat energy spins the $40 engine’s flywheel

Windows development guru Dave W. Plummer has shared a brief video demonstrating a novel cooling solution for his AMD Threadripper chipset. While not a real solution to an overheating chipset, the physics behind the Stirling Engine suggest that it does something, as it clearly converts waste heat energy to power a piston propelling a flywheel. We found what looks like the same Stirling Engine on Amazon for $39.99, and there’s currently a $10 off coupon if you feel like giving this chipset cooling tech a spin for yourself.

Patented in 1816 by Robert Stirling, the eponymous engine was positioned as a safer alternative to the steam engines of the day. It found some niche applications in water pumping and domestic tasks. Nowadays, the technology is useful in the fields of solar power, CHP, cryocooling, and submarine applications.

Briefly, a Stirling Engine converts heat energy to mechanical work. A heat source causes its gas piston (attached to a heatsink here) to expand, and that turns the flywheel, cooling the gas (reducing pressure). Momentum continues the flywheel cycle, and we get quite an efficient energy conversion going on. “The Stirling engine is characterized by its closed-cycle process involving a fixed amount of gas. The basic components include a heat source, a heat sink, a power piston, and a displacer piston,” explains Modern Physics, somewhat more scientifically. “The engine operates in four main phases: isothermal expansion, cooling at constant volume, isothermal compression, and heating at constant volume.”

You can see Plummer get the flywheel started right at the beginning of the video to help the process begin. In the Amazon listing for the Sunnytech Low Temperature Stirling Engine Motor Steam Heat Education Model Toy Kit For mechanical skills (LT001), you can see what looks like an identical item perched atop a hot beverage, as its power source. The listing suggests that the flywheel will spin up to about 200 RPM in a 20C/68F environment when placed on top of a hot cup of coffee. One Amazon user reports that the engine is sensitive enough to spin up from just the heat of your hand. In that case, a Threadripper motherboard chipset should definitely be enough.

We’d like to see Plummer share some chipset temperature details from before and after the Stirling Engine ‘installation.’ Also, we can see him running Cinebench on his 32-core, 64-thread AMD Threadripper 3970X right at the beginning of the video clip. Did it improve his benchmark scores? I guess we will probably find out in a longer-form video on the legendary dev Dave’s Garage YouTube channel.