The Quagmire that is Modern Computer Cooling: Low Performance, High Heat, No Way Out

Heat is a computer’s worst enemy. In every component, buildup of heat causes the kind of excess noise, unreliability, and performance bottlenecks that have plagued the personal and enterprise computing industries for years. The devastating effect of heat on computer components can be most easily felt when a part fails from overheating. According to researchers at Intel, “increasing HDD [hard disk drive] temperature by 5°C has the same effect on reliability as switching from 10 percent to 100 percent HDD workload” (drdobbs.com/go-parallel/article /215800830?pgno=3). Overheating of the processor, memory, or graphics card is also notorious for causing seemingly random shutdowns and freezes. In particularly severe cases such as the infamous Xbox 360 “Red Ring of Death” problem, overheating can cause permanent damage costing hundreds of dollars.

A slightly less obvious effect of inadequate cooling in computer components comes in the form of performance slowdowns. Since heat increases more or less linearly with processor clock speed, modern processors scale down to lower speeds when temperatures get too high. Also, the only reason that no consumer processor has shipped with a clock speed above 3.6GHz is that neither Intel’s nor AMD’s air coolers can dissipate the heat produced by faster-clocked processors. When NVidia’s GTX 480 graphics card came out in March of 2010, it had to ship with more than 6% of its processing units disabled because even top of the line air coolers couldn’t handle the full heat of the card. It’s worth noting that for the most part, these problems only affect users of high-performance equipment, such as gamers, scientific and mathematical modelers, and engineers. While this fact might limit the potential market share of a high-performance cooling product, manufacturers such as Corsair and Asetek have partnered with companies like Acer, Alienware, and HP to provide cooling directly to the makers of powerful gaming computers and workstations.

With new components that produce more heat than ever and cooling technology at the same level of sophistication as it was 20 years ago, traditional air cooling has also become louder and more expensive. Massive copper heat pipes increase the prices of high-end coolers, and increasingly more numerous and powerful fans have become loud annoyances to consumers trying to get some work –or play– done at a quiet computer.

The Result: Heat distortion on a poorly-cooled Mac