Sümeyye Sever

Cooling the System

Thermal Load

• Heat from different components inside the computer

Now what we need to do is get what thermal load reduced, because if it’s get too high, it can actually burn up our motherboard and its sensitive components. There is three different cooling method out there.

1. Passive Cooling

• Type of cooling that doesn’t rely on moving parts or power

  Heat Sink

  • Finned metal device that radiates heat away fom the processor
  • They give more surface area to your processor or other components by appliying finned metal device on top of it.

  Thermal Paste

  • Compound that ensures heat transfer by eliminating air gaps.
  • This thermal paste is going to act as a phase change metarial and help take the heat out of the processor and into the heat sink, where it then gets that additional surface area provided by the heat sink and cools to the ambient temperature. This is the idea of how passive cooling works.

• Passive cooling requires no power to operate and is silent when operating.

• Great!!! But,,,,, processor and other components can create entirely too much heat to be able to dissipiate all of it using passive components.

2. Active Cooling

• Uses a fan to cool down the heat from the device.
• When you deal with the active cooling, you’re going to have to provide power to that fan, and that fan is then going to spin at certain revolution. The faster that fan spins, the more airflow is going to be created and this allows more heat to be dissipiated.
• Where can you find this fans:
  1. On top of the processor
  2. Case fans
  3. Back of the power supply
  4. External graphics cards
• Remove excess dust from the fan every three to six months.

3. Liquid Cooling

• For high performance systems
• Complicated to install
• Less power, less noise

Power Supply Unit (PSU)