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Hardware components of the PC All processors need some cooling as some heat is always generated. Lowering the voltage used by the processor will reduce the amount of heat generated. As the processors got faster and faster, larger heatsinks and fans were fitted directly to them. The more cooling a processor has the better. A water based cooling system was developed called the Peltier system, which provided more cooling in a similar way to the early mainframes. Although Intel processors will stand a slight amount of overheating and just close down, the AMD and Cyrix processors will not and permanent damage will be caused to these processors if run with improper or no cooling. When fitting a CPU to a board ensure that some heatsink compound is placed between the CPU and the processor. It is vital to follow the compound manufacturer’s instructions. Most mother boards allow different processor speeds to be selected, either by links or in the CMOS configuration. This allows the user or motherboard installer to select a higher clock speed than that recommended, for example a Pentium 100Mhz processor could be run at 120MHz or 133MHz, causing the processor to run at a higher speed. This technique is called overclocking and can result in mistiming of processor operations, which can cause applications to crash, and increase of heat, requiring larger heatsinks and fans. It is not recommended to overclock a processor, especially when the higher speed processors are relatively cheap these days. |