Cpu Heatsink And Fan Definition

A heat sink also commonly spelled heatsink is a passive heat exchanger that transfers the heat generated by an electronic or a mechanical device to a fluid medium often air or a liquid coolant where it is dissipated away from the device thereby allowing regulation of the device s temperature.

Cpu heatsink and fan definition.

As the name suggests it is composed of a passive cooling unit the heat sink and a fan. A heat sink is a thermal conductive metal device designed to absorb and disperse heat away from a high temperature object such as a computer processor. Fans and heat sinks together this chip coolers fan sits on top of a heat sink to cool a hot running cpu chip. A heat sink is a device that incorporates a fan or another mechanism to reduce the temperature of a hardware component e g processor there are two heat sink types.

A heat sink and fan hsf is an active cooling solution used to cool down integrated circuits in computer systems commonly the central processing unit cpu. The picture is an example of a heat sink that has both active and passive cooling mechanisms. Optionally there may be other fans inside the case to blow the heated air. Usually heat sinks are outfitted with built in fans to help keep both the cpu and the heat sink at an appropriate temperature.

But sometimes the heat sink itself can become too hot. As the processor continues to work at a rapid pace it begins to generate heat. In computers heat sinks are used to cool cpus gpus and some chipsets and ram modules. The simplest cooler is an aluminum heat sink which absorbs and disperses the heat.

A computer s cpu may perform millions of calculations every second. The heatsink a large block of copper or aluminum draws the heat away from the cpu and the fan then cools the heatsink.