A very common method to cool the components inside of our
computers is something called a heat sink.
This is a copper or aluminum piece that is put on top of a
very hot component.
Usually these are the very hot chips that are right on our
motherboards.
And as they heat up, all of the heat is pulled up through
this heat sink.
And because we have all these little holes that are being
pulled here as the air blows through it, it is also cooling
the top of the heap sink.
So we're able to dissipate that heat and get rid of it
outside of our computing case.
You can see that the surface area is very large.
We take it from that very flat area and extend it up through
these little fins, and let that air flow through.
One important piece of this is that underneath this heat sink
where it is connecting to that very, very hot chip, we put a
thermal grease that is designed to keep a good
connection between the heat sink and the processor itself.
If that particular connection is not very good, then the
heat is not going to dissipate well.
And that thermal grease is designed to keep a very good
connection between the heat sink and the component itself.
One important safety tip is if you're doing a lot of
processing on your computer, these components are
getting very hot.
And because the heat sink is dissipating that heat, it also
gets very hot.
So if you're working inside of a computer that you've just
turned off, be careful, because these heat sinks can
get very, very warm to the touch.
In your computer, there's probably more than one heat
sink that you have.
You can see a heat sink that might be on a main processor.
There's other heat sinks that might be on a north bridge,
and other components themselves may
have other heat sinks.
These look kind of interesting in that they have these little
fins come up, and they almost look like flames coming up
through there for a little bit of a design right there on
your motherboard.
But they're all performing the same function.
They're taking the heat off of these components that are on
the motherboard itself, and pulling that heat right off so
that the air can cool it as it goes by.
It's also not uncommon to put heat sinks right on top of
your processors, and on top of the heat sinks, you might even
have fans that are pulling that air right off of the heat
sink itself and sending it out of the case.
So you may have fans on the case that are connected
physically to the heat sinks themselves to add that much
more cooling capability to those components.
Sometimes you'll see an adapter card that has on it
its own set of fans, especially if it's something
like a video card.
These can be kind of bulky because you not only have the
adapter card itself, but you've now put a fan inside of
it to make sure that it gets its own cooling as well.
It's almost always seen on these high end graphics cards,
or other types of cards that are performing very, very high
end processes, because those components tend to
get very, very hot.
If you don't know how the air flows through your particular
computer, you should take a look at it and see, even if
it's a laptop or a desktop, there on that device is a fan
somewhere that's pulling air in, and it should be exiting
out another part of the case.
You'll probably want to look in a desktop computer
especially, because the layout of the motherboard becomes
very important, especially the cables that you use to connect
hard drives, cables that you're using to connect back
to the case itself all have an effect of the air flow through
the device.
So you want to be sure that all of the fans are able to
pull air through as efficiently as possible, and
that none of those wires or cables are getting in the way.
There's a lot of different styles of fans, and a lot of
different volume levels of fans that you can
have in your case.
You may not just have one.
You may have multiple fans, and they may be different
sizes, but they all work together to make sure that
you're able to take the cool air from the outside and blow
it through the inside of the computer to cool it off.
Here's an example of a server appliance that is
using that same idea.
There are fans that are pulling from the cool side and
pulling that on top of and through the motherboard, and
the air is exiting out these holes in the back.
And that's an important consideration, is you want to
be sure that those holes are always clear.
You want to be sure there's no dust.
You want to be sure that the air is able to come into the
computer and exit out as quickly as possible.
If these start to get plugged, you'll find that the
temperature inside of your computer will
rise very, very rapidly.
If you're adding a fan or replacing a fan and a
motherboard, you'll find there are very standard sizes,
usually something like an 80 millimeter or 120 millimeter,
or different types, depending on the case that you have.
These fans can also run at different speeds.
Often you can plug the fan into an interface, and the
motherboard sensors will determine how fast that fan
needs to run based on how hot the inside of the computer
case happens to be.
There are also different noise levels.
So if you don't like the fan that's inside of your desktop
computer now, you can probably find one that is much quieter
at exactly the same size, that probably moves the same amount
of air, and replace it, and immediately
have a quieter computer.
But we don't always have to use air for our computing.
We could use liquid.
And these days, the liquid is a coolant that we are
circulating.
In this case, you can see circulating from a connection
that's right on top of a processor, and it's moving
into a fan.
It's radiating out that heat as the air passes through, and
then the liquid goes back onto that particular area to get
heated up again, and the process repeats.
It's the same process we use for automobiles.
It's the same process we use for our
large mainframe computers.
We've taken that liquid cooling and collapsed it into
a size that's small enough to put inside
of our desktop computers.
You usually see this on high end systems.
If you're doing a lot of gaming or a set of processes
that really increases the amount of work the CPU does,
maybe you need some additional cooling that the air cooling
is just not going to be able to do for you.
And if you're experimenting with your computer and you're
overclocking the CPU itself, you know that that processor
is going to get warm.
That may be a perfect example to, instead of using air
cooling, use some type of liquid cooling for your
processors.