Dave W. Plummer, the creator of the Microsoft Task Manager, recently demonstrated a miniature Stirling engine powered by the waste heat from an AMD Ryzen Threadripper motherboard. The software developer shared a video clip showing the toy engine running inside his desktop case. The engine sits directly on a motherboard heatsink, converting thermal output into kinetic energy.
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The desktop computer shown in the video uses an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X processor, which has 32 cores and 64 threads based on the Zen 2 architecture. High-end processors of this caliber are typically paired with massive memory configurations, exceeding the requirements found even in the best 32gb ram laptops. To generate the thermal load needed to spin the flywheel, Plummer ran a Cinebench rendering benchmark in the background.
The toy engine is placed directly on the motherboard chipset area rather than the CPU cooling block itself. The AMD chipset heatsink gets warm enough during CPU stress tests to drive the low-temperature Stirling cycle. These small engines are commonly sold as educational science kits and can run using the warmth of a hot drink or a human hand.
Plummer did not publish any before-and-after chipset temperature readouts to show if the engine acts as an effective passive cooler. There is no evidence that this setup improves computing performance or offers practical thermal benefits. However, the experiment provides a fun visual demonstration of how much waste heat modern motherboard chipsets can produce under load.
For hardware enthusiasts, the video showcases a creative way to repurpose PC heat using simple physics. Low-temperature Stirling toys remain popular for desktop decorations and educational projects. Attentive readers can watch the original clip on Plummer’s social media profile to see the flywheel in action.
Source: Dave W. Plummer (X/Twitter)
