Computer cooling

Article summary

with fan clipped onto a CPU, with a smaller passive heatsink without fan in the background to maximize cooling efficiency of the GPU and surrounding components computer's switch-mode power supply, with a user-installed 60 mm cooling fan. Vertical aluminium profiles are used as heatsinks. Computer cooling is required to remove the waste heat produced by computer hardware to keep components within permissible operating temperature limits. Components that are susceptible to temporary malfunction or permanent failure if overheated include integrated circuits such as central processing units (CPUs), chipsets, graphics cards, hard disk drives, and solid state drives (SSDs). Components are often designed to generate as little heat as possible, and computers and operating systems may be designed to reduce power consumption and consequent heating according to workload, but more heat may still be produced than can be removed without attention to cooling. Use of heatsinks cooled by airflow reduces the temperature rise produced by a given amount of heat. Attention to patterns of airflow can prevent the development of hotspots. Computer fans are widely used along with heatsink fans to reduce temperature by actively exhausting hot air. There are also other cooling techniques, such as liquid cooling.…

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