Air Cooling

• The overwhelming majority of today's consumer grade computers use heatsinks and fans to dissipate the heat generated by the computer. In a standard computer case, a fan is found on top of the heatsink which covers the CPU, on the graphics controller card, inside the power supply, with one or more fans attached to the case itself. When adding a fan, ensure that a directional air flow is maintained. Air must be pulled into the case from one side and expelled through the opposite side. Recently, the heatpipe has been introduced to supplement the heatsink. It is important to orient heatpipes so that the cooler is located on top of the CPU, or the heat pipe's ability to conduct heat is greatly reduced.
  
  

Water Cooling

• Originally introduced into the PC field from the mainframe industry by way of the overclocking crowd, water cooling has now become an affordable method of cooling computers, especially in cases where a silent PC is the goal. Water cooling systems consist of a reservoir, a pump, a cooling tower, tubing and as many heatsink blocks as required. Typically, heatsink blocks will be attached to the CPU, the GPU and any large, heat producing chips on the motherboard where cooling is needed. These heatsink blocks are then connected to the pump using plastic tubing. The pump then draws water from the reservoir, and pumps it to each of the blocks, where the water takes on heat. From there, the the heated water is pumped to the cooling tower and then back to the reservoir, where the process is continually repeated. It is important to note that when one of these water cooling systems is installed, all air must be bled from the system.
  
  

Underclocking

• In the quest to develop a completely noise-free system, the process of intentionally forcing the CPU into a lower clock cycle setting is employed. As this state reduces the amount of calculations the CPU can perform, and thereby lowers the energy used to do this work, less cooling is needed. In extreme examples of this technique, a CPU that would normally require a heatsink and fan can now be run with only a heatsink. When this system is matched with a solid state power supply, a low noise hard drive and a graphics card that only requires a heatsink, these systems become extremely quiet to the point where it is difficult to determine if they are running without a visual inspection.