Heatsinks

Teamgroup There are a wide range of cooling solutions for the average PC, from the mundane to the extremely exotic, but for most PC buyers, builders, and enthusiasts, the two main options to pick from are air cooling and water cooling. Although it’s fair to say that air cooling is more straightforward and water requires a few additional considerations, it still might be worth going the extra mile to chill your components with liquid. Let’s take a look at how air cooling and liquid cooling compare, to see which is…

A Peltier thermoelectric cooler module Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNETI was approached the other day for cooling advice for an SBC (single board computer) project. Without going into unnecessary detail, the issue was that the board needed to operate in an unusually warm environment, and even with a heatsink and fan installed, the processor was running rather close to the thermal edge.If a heatsink and fan weren't enough to cool the board, what could be done without resorting to drastic modifications?  (The board in…

Heatsinks are a staple of PC cooling technology as we know it. Both passive and active coolers make use of heatspreaders and heatsinks, but a team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) recently found what looks like a far better, all-encompassing, and sleeker solution.The researchers describe their experiments and findings in a paper entitled "High-efficiency cooling via the monolithic integration of copper on electronic devices," as…