But I was wondering if there are articles or if someone can tell me what cooling does. How expensive is it. Well im guessing it just cools your comp down.
HSF (Heatsink/Fan Unit): This is a combination of a (Typically...) copper + aluminum chunk of precisely-engineered metal and a high-flow fan. It sits on top of your processor and absorbs the heat dissipated by the CPU, and radiates it into the sink, which the fan then blows across to cool. This component will vary wildly in price depending on what you do with your PC (No overclocking, high overclocking, budget PC, performance PC..)
Case fans: Self-explanatory, but these are the fans inside your case that shuffle cool air in, and take hot air out.
GPU cooler: All video cards come with some form of inherent cooler. These days it's a copper slab that consumes the face of the card, with a large, low-profile fan. Generally this cooling can even be upgraded.
RAM Sinks: These are little blocks of aluminum or copper that sit on chips of memory on the video card. They help pull heat away, as these chips run faster than any other kind of RAM on the PC.
Heatspreaders: These are thin wafers of copper that sandwich a stick of memory between them. They look nice, but offer no performance benefit.
Generally speaking, here is the basic recipe for good cooling:
1 good HSF with an appropriate fan. The CPU own will determine what those are.
3 80MM case fans to move air in and out of your case
The video card will come with its own cooling
The cooling I selected for that computer is about as good as it gets without paying for $200-350 watercooling. If that's something you're interested in, we can help you, but it would change a great many things inside your PC.
Imagine (if you will for a moment) the waves lapping at your overheated body on a hot summer's day. This is what watercooling does for your poor overworked CPU and (possibly) GPU on a daily basis. Yes there are good aircooling solutions out there but to get the amount of cooling afforded by a competent watercooling setup an aircooling setup has to be ungodly loud (c'mon, someone argue this point) meanwhile if done properly the watercooling setup will be no louder than a middling aircooled rig.
Dollar for dollar an aircooled setup will be cheaper than a watercooled rig BUT it will be louder due to the inefficiency associated with aircooling rigs, an aircooled rig is limited by the square inches of heatsink material exposed to the air passing across it, whereas a watercooled rig gives greater area for the air to whisk away the heat created by your hot-running CPU (and/or) GPU which would be impractical to hang off your average motherboard.
In a watercooled rig the heat is removed from the core components by fluid passing through waterblocks mounted to them, the heat is absorbed by the fluid and carried away via the tidal action afforded by the pump. The fluid then carries the heat to the heat-exchanger (read that as radiator) where air blowing through the heatexchanger exchanges the heat to the surrounding air (hence the name) and cools the fluid where the fluid heads for either the pump or the reservoir (this depends upon your school of thought here, some abstain from using a reservoir for a simpler system while others believe that using one allows for more heat to be absorbed by the cooling system before a buildup of heat begins) and from there it continues it's cycle of cooling.
The heatexchanger is the reason a watercooled rig is so powerfull, it affords turbulence to both the air passing through it AND the fluid passing through it which helps to shed heat, it also offers a far greater area in terms of square inches for the air to interact with the fluid thus soaking up more heat than a simple HSF unit can provide. Plus when done correctly the air passing through the heatexchanger will be cool (cooler at any rate) room temperature air rather than pre-heated case air allowing for even greater delta (drop) in temperature.
It all boils (well hopefully not actually boiling) down to what you want to spend and how far you're willing to go for good temps, for the extremists out there there are other options ranging from peltiers (both watercooled and aircooled) to phase change to liquid nitrogen to dry ice but for the generally sane among us aircooling and watercooling tend to be the 2 most common choices when looking into cooling solutions for our PC's.
eh? I have been giving this statement deep deep thought and I'm
Essentially, heat cannot be destroyed - just moved to another location.
The A/C you have at home is merely a device which dumps the heat inside your house outdoors. Next summer when it's nice and toasty and your A/C unit is cranking full blast, go outside and stand next to the condenser unit in your yard (or "Garden", as it may be ). It will be dumping hot air that is far warmer than the official outside air temperature.
Cooling a computer simply transfers the heat from inside the case to the room in which it is located. I have seen some hard-core enthusiasts who actually ran watercooling setups with the radiator located outside the building, though the massive pump(s) required did not make this a very cost-effective solution.
A few years back I lived in a dinky one BR apartment which was half underground, providing a tremendous amount of thermal insulation. At times I had up to eight computers running. It was a relatively mild winter (Arlington, VA) and I did not need to turn the heat on at any time during the entire season. I even recall running the A/C at times throughout the winter.
Well thanks for the explanation Prof, but there's just one small point to consider, this is the UK and domestic A/C is a very rare thing indeed In fact many of us still live in mud huts and drive chariots.
I was just thinking along the lines of - if something's hot, it can be cooled. Now whether this is viewed as cooling of object 'a' or as heat transfer from object 'a' to another location, is a subjective view.
I could go on, but I'm not going to, cos it'll do me brain in
I never thought such a simple subject could get so deep. Well, it is deep if you let it be, right there on a par with the meaning of life, the universe and everything
...I was just thinking along the lines of - if something's hot, it can be cooled...
Nope. If something's cold, it can be heated; not the other way around, though that is the apparent effect. The best illustration I've found is this:
Q. If you adjust a refrigerator to maximum "cooling" and leave the door open would the temperature of a perfectly insulated room:
A) Go Down
B) Go Up
C) Remain the same
The answer is "B". No heat engine is 100% efficient. The cooler air spewing from the open refrigerator door would be more than offset by the heat being dumped out the condenser coil (usually mounted on the back).
As far as the "mud huts" situation, my American friends who have been fortunate enough to visit your country tell me that they are very lovely. I hope to see them in person some day.
Comments
HSF (Heatsink/Fan Unit): This is a combination of a (Typically...) copper + aluminum chunk of precisely-engineered metal and a high-flow fan. It sits on top of your processor and absorbs the heat dissipated by the CPU, and radiates it into the sink, which the fan then blows across to cool. This component will vary wildly in price depending on what you do with your PC (No overclocking, high overclocking, budget PC, performance PC..)
Case fans: Self-explanatory, but these are the fans inside your case that shuffle cool air in, and take hot air out.
GPU cooler: All video cards come with some form of inherent cooler. These days it's a copper slab that consumes the face of the card, with a large, low-profile fan. Generally this cooling can even be upgraded.
RAM Sinks: These are little blocks of aluminum or copper that sit on chips of memory on the video card. They help pull heat away, as these chips run faster than any other kind of RAM on the PC.
Heatspreaders: These are thin wafers of copper that sandwich a stick of memory between them. They look nice, but offer no performance benefit.
Generally speaking, here is the basic recipe for good cooling:
1 good HSF with an appropriate fan. The CPU own will determine what those are.
3 80MM case fans to move air in and out of your case
The video card will come with its own cooling
Dollar for dollar an aircooled setup will be cheaper than a watercooled rig BUT it will be louder due to the inefficiency associated with aircooling rigs, an aircooled rig is limited by the square inches of heatsink material exposed to the air passing across it, whereas a watercooled rig gives greater area for the air to whisk away the heat created by your hot-running CPU (and/or) GPU which would be impractical to hang off your average motherboard.
In a watercooled rig the heat is removed from the core components by fluid passing through waterblocks mounted to them, the heat is absorbed by the fluid and carried away via the tidal action afforded by the pump. The fluid then carries the heat to the heat-exchanger (read that as radiator) where air blowing through the heatexchanger exchanges the heat to the surrounding air (hence the name) and cools the fluid where the fluid heads for either the pump or the reservoir (this depends upon your school of thought here, some abstain from using a reservoir for a simpler system while others believe that using one allows for more heat to be absorbed by the cooling system before a buildup of heat begins) and from there it continues it's cycle of cooling.
The heatexchanger is the reason a watercooled rig is so powerfull, it affords turbulence to both the air passing through it AND the fluid passing through it which helps to shed heat, it also offers a far greater area in terms of square inches for the air to interact with the fluid thus soaking up more heat than a simple HSF unit can provide. Plus when done correctly the air passing through the heatexchanger will be cool (cooler at any rate) room temperature air rather than pre-heated case air allowing for even greater delta (drop) in temperature.
It all boils (well hopefully not actually boiling) down to what you want to spend and how far you're willing to go for good temps, for the extremists out there there are other options ranging from peltiers (both watercooled and aircooled) to phase change to liquid nitrogen to dry ice but for the generally sane among us aircooling and watercooling tend to be the 2 most common choices when looking into cooling solutions for our PC's.
eh? I have been giving this statement deep deep thought and I'm
I'm sure it could be debated at great length and a complete thesis written.
I do believe it has completely killed what few meagre brain cells I had left
cool!
The A/C you have at home is merely a device which dumps the heat inside your house outdoors. Next summer when it's nice and toasty and your A/C unit is cranking full blast, go outside and stand next to the condenser unit in your yard (or "Garden", as it may be
Cooling a computer simply transfers the heat from inside the case to the room in which it is located. I have seen some hard-core enthusiasts who actually ran watercooling setups with the radiator located outside the building, though the massive pump(s) required did not make this a very cost-effective solution.
A few years back I lived in a dinky one BR apartment which was half underground, providing a tremendous amount of thermal insulation. At times I had up to eight computers running. It was a relatively mild winter (Arlington, VA) and I did not need to turn the heat on at any time during the entire season. I even recall running the A/C at times throughout the winter.
I was just thinking along the lines of - if something's hot, it can be cooled. Now whether this is viewed as cooling of object 'a' or as heat transfer from object 'a' to another location, is a subjective view.
I could go on, but I'm not going to, cos it'll do me brain in
I never thought such a simple subject could get so deep. Well, it is deep if you let it be, right there on a par with the meaning of life, the universe and everything
Q. If you adjust a refrigerator to maximum "cooling" and leave the door open would the temperature of a perfectly insulated room:
A) Go Down
B) Go Up
C) Remain the same
The answer is "B". No heat engine is 100% efficient. The cooler air spewing from the open refrigerator door would be more than offset by the heat being dumped out the condenser coil (usually mounted on the back).
As far as the "mud huts" situation, my American friends who have been fortunate enough to visit your country tell me that they are very lovely. I hope to see them in person some day.