Heat generated by electronic devices and circuit must be dissipated to improve reliability and prevent premature failure. Techniques for heat dissipation can include heat sinks and fans for air cooling, and other forms of computer cooling such as liquid cooling. Computer cooling is the process of removing heat from computer components. Because a computer system's components produce large amounts of heat during operation, this heat must be dissipated in order to keep these components within their safe operating temperatures. In addition to maintaining normative function, Components which produce heat and are susceptible to performance loss and damage include integrated circuits such as CPUs, chipset and graphics cards, along with hard drives (though excessive cooling of hard drives has been found to have negative effects). Overheated parts generally exhibit a shorter maximum life-span and may give sporadic problems resulting in system freezes or crashes. Both integral (manufacturing) and peripheral means (additional parts) are used to keep the heat of each component at a safe operational level. With regard to integral means, CPU and GPUs are designed entirely with energy efficiency, including heat dissipation, in mind, and with each advance CPUs/GPUs generally produce less heat (though this increased efficiency is always used to increase performance, producing similar heat levels as earlier models anyway). Cooling through peripheral means is mainly done using heat sinks to increase the surface area which dissipates heat, fans to speed up the exchange of air heated by the computer parts for cooler ambient air, and in some cases soft cooling. Comparisons between traditional methods of CPU cooling, and new fashions of cooling (like Heat pipes, and Thermoelectric cooling) have been performed. Moreover, Thermal affects on processor performance, has been studied. Effect of time on heat transfer and processor temperature enhancement has been studied.
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