Teacher: Jesna Subject : Physics Description: Computer cooling is required to remove the waste heat produced by computer compo

nents, to keep components within their safe operating temperature limits. Varied cooling methods are used to either achieve greater processor performance or to reduce the noise caused by cooling fans. Components which produce heat and are susceptible to performance loss and damage include integrated circuits such as CPUs, chipset and graphics cards, along wit h hard drives (though excessive cooling of hard drives has been found to have ne gative effects). Overheated parts fail early and may give sporadic problems resu lting in system freezes or crashes. Both integral and peripheral means are used to keep the temperature of each comp onent at a safe level. With regard to integral means, CPU and GPUs are designed with energy efficiency, including heat dissipation, in mind; though improved eff iciency may only allow increased performance instead of reduced heat. Peripheral means include heat sinks to increase the surface area which dissipates heat, fa ns to speed up the exchange of air heated by the computer parts for cooler ambie nt air, and in some cases softcooling, the throttling of computer parts in order to decrease heat generation As a safety measure, many computers are designed to turn themselves off if the i nternal temperature exceeds a certain point. Alternatively, some have an option in their BIOS that allows the user to determine if the system emits an alarm bee p or shuts itself down when the core temperature reaches the level set by the us er. However, setting this incorrectly can result in hardware damage or erratic s ystem behaviour. An uncommon practice is to submerge the computer's components in a thermally con ductive liquid. Personal computers that are cooled in this manner do not genera lly require any fans or pumps, and may be cooled exclusively by passive heat exc hange between the computer's parts, the cooling fluid and the ambient air. Extre me component density supercomputers such as the Cray-2 and Cray T90 used additio nal liquid to chilled liquid heat exchangers in order to facilitate heat removal . The liquid used must have sufficiently low electrical conductivity in order for it not to interfere with the normal operation of the computer's components. If t he liquid is somewhat electrically conductive, it may be necessary to insulate c ertain parts of components susceptible to electromagnetic interference, such as the CPU.[3] For these reasons, it is preferred that the liquid be dielectric. Liquids commonly used in this manner include various liquids invented and manufa ctured for this purpose by 3M, such as Fluorinert. Various oils, including but n ot limited to cooking, motor and silicone oils have all been successfully used f or cooling personal computers.