Cooling

Submitted by brandon on March 24, 2008 - 12:00pm. Thermal Compound Roundup

Thermal compound is very important when it comes to running a cool computer. It helps to facilitate the dissipation of heat from the processor to the heatsink. Without thermal compound, it doesn't matter whether you're using stock cooling, high end air cooling, water cooling or above, cooling performance will be dismal.

In the past few years, thermal compounds have undergone an evolution. I'm sure many are familiar with the basic silicon based thermal compound, also known as white goop. This quickly evolved into metal based thermal compounds, which by its namesake have a composition of metal particles. This improved the thermal conductivity, but also had the problem of being electrically conductive.

Now we are at a stage where performance thermal compounds are ceramics based. Thermal conductivity has been improved even more, and don't have the problem of being electrically conductive. Most of the thermal compounds we are looking at today are ceramics based.

The thermal compounds we are looking at in our mini-roundup are the Stars-700, Noctua's HT-N1, Arctic Silver's Ceramique, Tuniq's TX-2 and OCZ's Freeze.

Submitted by brandon on February 21, 2008 - 12:00pm. OCZ Vendetta CPU Cooler

The word vendetta makes me think of the recent movie, V for Vendetta. It makes me think of a challenge and rebellious behaviour against the establishment. So what does this mean in regards to OCZ's Vendetta CPU Cooler? I'm guessing it refers to OCZ's fight against the heat eminated within from processors: OCZ's Vendetta against heat! Sounds corny? Yes it does. BUT did OCZ win the bitter feud? Let's find out.

OCZ Vendetta CPU Cooler

OCZ's Vendetta CPU cooler is a heatsink with the tried and effective heat pipe and fin design. The fins are aluminum, the heat pipe is copper, and the fan is 92mm. Together, this creates a light weight cooling package.

Submitted by brandon on January 8, 2008 - 7:28pm. Easy Homebrew 8800GT Cooling for Less Than $10 (or Free!)

I'm an owner of an nVidia 8800GT 512MB video card, an eVGA reference design model to be exact, and performance wise it's great. I'm able to play all my games at my 20" widescreen LCD's native resolution, usually with anti-aliasing and high quality settings. My one quirk with the card is that sometimes it gets quite hot. I know this because the whine of the temperature controlled fan increases high enough that I can pick it out of the background with ease.

My hate of high pitch fan noise set me forth on a quest to find a way to quiet down the card. With my other video card, an 8800GTS 640MB, I never really had any noise issues. In comparing both cards, the 8800GT and the GTS, you can easily pick out the differences in the coolers. The 8800GT cooler is a mere single slot design, with a thin heatsink and smaller fan, whereas the 8800GTS cooler is a dual slot design, with a taller heatsink with more surface area and a bigger blower (not to mention it exhausts hot air directly out the case).

Submitted by brandon on March 1, 2007 - 9:58am. Antec Notebook Cooler S

There two general names for the class of the typical portable computers you see everyday and they are laptop and notebook. An older name, laptop used to be much more common than the term notebook. As the term implies, laptop computers were able to be used while on a user's lap. But this isn't the case anymore. With further miniaturization of components, packing more powerful parts in denser packages generally results in heat issues. The direct result of this for portable computer users is a hot computer. This in itself isn't bad, but there are health concerns from using a hot computer on your lap.