A small Stirling engine was placed on a Threadripper board heatsink and powered by waste heat
© Dave W. Plummer Dave W. Plummer has shared a short video showing a miniature Stirling engine mounted inside his AMD Threadripper system. While the post says it’s cooling the Threadriper CPU, it’s actually the other way around. The engine is placed on a motherboard heatsink and uses system heat to move a piston and spin a flywheel.
The system shown in the clip is based on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X. This is a 32-core, 64-thread Zen 2 processor for the sTRX4 platform. The video also shows Cinebench running in the background, which helps generate load and heat. The toy engine is not mounted on the CPU cooler itself. The engine that was placed on the chipset heatsink area of the motherboard.
© Dave W. Plummer A Stirling engine works by using a temperature difference between its hot and cold sides. The heated gas expands, moves a piston, and drives the flywheel. Low-temperature models like this are often sold as educational kits and can run from a hot cup, a hand, or another mild heat source.
Plummer did not share before-and-after chipset temperatures. There is also no evidence that this improves performance or cooling in any measurable way. Still, it is a good visual demo of how much heat even motherboard components can provide.
Source via Tom’s Hardware :
Cooling my Threadripper chipset with a Stirling Engine! pic.twitter.com/2JG6i70zBn
— Dave W Plummer (@davepl1968) July 3, 2026
