Datasheet
74
Chapter 1
N
Personal Computer System Components
enhanced heat dissipation. For this, you can buy either heat sinks or, as mentioned earlier,
special “for memory chips only” devices known as heat spreaders. These are special alumi-
num or copper housings that wrap around memory chips and conduct the heat away from
the memory chips.
Active cooling, on the other hand, usually involves forcing some kind of cooling medium
(air or water) around the RAM chips themselves or around their heat sinks. Most often,
active cooling methods are just high-speed fans directing air right over a set of heat spreaders.
Hard Drive Cooling
You might be thinking, “Hey, my hard drive is working all the time. Is there anything I
can do to cool it off as well?” There are both active and passive cooling devices for hard
drives. Most common, however, is the active cooling bay. You install a hard drive in a spe-
cial device that fits into a 5¼˝ expansion bay. This device contains fans that draw in cool
air over the hard drive, thus cooling it. Figure 1.56 shows an example of one of these active
hard drive coolers. As you might suspect, you can also get heat sinks for hard drives.
FIGURE 1.56 An active hard disk cooler
Chipset Cooling
Every motherboard has a chip or chipset that controls how the computer operates. As with
other chips in the computer, the chipset is normally cooled by the ambient air movement in
the case. However, when you overclock a computer, the chipset may need to be cooled more
as it is working harder than it normally would be. Therefore, it is often desirable to replace
the onboard chipset cooler with a more efficient one. Refer back to Figure 1.4 for a look at
a modern chipset cooling solution.
CPU Cooling
Probably the greatest challenge in cooling is the cooling of the computer’s CPU. It is the com-
ponent that generates the most heat in a computer. As a matter of fact, if a modern processor
isn’t actively cooled all the time, it will generate enough heat to burn itself up in an instant.
That’s why most motherboards have an internal CPU heat sensor and a CPU_FAN sensor. If
no cooling fan is active, these devices will shut down the computer before damage occurs.
There are a few different types of CPU cooling methods, but the most important can be
grouped into two broad categories: air cooling and advanced cooling methods.
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