CPU Heating

Personal computers (PCs), however, until very recently, have traditionally had few heat-related problems. This is because, in the past, the components never ran fast or hot compared to the state-of-the-art technologies that existed at the time. Few, if any, systems with heatsinks based upon early Intel-286 or -386 microprocessor architectures appeared. In these early PC products, the CPUs were only warm to the touch during normal operation.

This trend started to change around the time the Intel-486-series of CPUs entered the PC marketplace. Now, for the first time, for most users, the basic 486 was becoming hot to the touch and the faster versions started to appear with a metal heatsink attached on the ceramic package.

Later, the first Pentium CPUs, the 60MHz and 66MHz versions, were characterized by excessive heat dissipation and ultimately became the first PC CPU that had to be cooled by the presence of a motorized fan. Since that time, the heatsink/fan combination has become a standard fixture.

The central processing units (CPUs) utilized in personal computers (PCs) have, over the last several years, become highly sophisticated. This sophistication is being driven not only by the average bu

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Figure 2. CPU Heat Dissipation Paths (Citarella, 2000). The CPU package also traps an amount of heat. By moving heat off of the top surface of the case, the CPU core will be cooled. When the Celeron-class of processor first entered the market, the associated CPU heat challenges were encountered, were mitigated in typical fashion by placing a heat sink (piece of metal) on the front and the back of the CPU thus radiating the heat away from the sensitive CPU core. Applying basic heat transfer theory (Chapman, 1974,44-46) one could present the following set of equations to model this configuration as a multiplayer wall with specified boundary temperatures. q/A = (t1 –t2)/(?x12/k12) = (t2 –t3)/(?x23/k23) = (t3 –t4)/(?x34/k34) where: ?x12 = Material thickness between the various planes. k12 = Thermal connectivity of material between the planes. The above equation can be solved for each of the temperature differences, with these differences taking the form: t1 –t2 = (q/A)(?x12/k12) t2 –t3 = (q/A)(?x23/k23) t3 –t4 = (q/A)(?x34/k34) Consequently the heat flow through the wall of the CPU will take the form: q/A = ?(t1 –t4) where: ? = [(?x12/k12)+ (?x23/k23)+ (?x34/k34)]-1 Once the heat f
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Approximate Word count = 2422
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)