The folks over at ID-Cooling have been working on a CPU cooler that uses a vapor chamber to draw heat away from the CPU. The CPU cooler is called the IS-VC45 and has a rather simple design.
The vapor chamber at the bottom of the cooler is welded to a handful of aluminum fins, and that's it. On top of those rests a slim 92 mm fan, and the entire construction is about 4 cm thick. Despite that, thanks to the vapor chamber, ID-Cooling stated that the unit is capable of dissipating heat coming from CPUs with TDP's of up to 130 W. For something this small, that's a tremendous amount of cooling power.
For comparison, the most powerful Intel CPU that you can put in a Mini-ITX system, which is what the cooler is geared at, is the Intel Core i7-4790K. This chip has a TDP of 88 W, meaning that all things being equal, you'll even have some cooling headroom left so that the CPU can run a little faster than its 4.0 GHz base frequency.
The fan on this unit will spin at speeds between 600 RPM and 2500 RPM, and they use a fluid dynamic bearing. ID-Cooling did not give information on the noise the fans will produce.
For larger systems, a CPU cooler with a vapor chamber simply doesn't make sense, which is almost certainly why we haven't seen very many of them. For smaller systems, however, where you cannot install large CPU coolers or water cooling loops, you need all the cooling power you can get in the smallest possible form factor.
The sticker price for this cooler isn't bad either, with ID-Cooling giving it an MSRP of $44.99. For comparison, Noctua's NH-L9i, which is a premium CPU cooler with almost identical dimensions, goes for $44.99 on Newegg.com but is only capable of dissipating up to 65 W for typical Haswell builds. There's no word yet on availability.
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