Computer cooling
removal of waste heat from a computer or computer component
Computer cooling is required to remove the waste heat produced by computer hardware to keep components within permissible operating temperature limits. Components that are susceptible to temporary malfunction or permanent failure if overheated include integrated circuits such as central processing units (CPUs), chipsets, graphics cards, hard disk drives, and solid state drives (SSDs).
Components are often designed to generate as little heat as possible, and computers and operating systems may be designed to reduce power consumption and consequent heating according to workload, but more heat may still be produced than can be removed without attention to cooling. Use of heatsinks cooled by airflow reduces the temperature rise produced by a given amount of heat. Attention to patterns of airflow can prevent the development of hotspots. Computer fans are widely used along with heatsink fans to reduce temperature by actively exhausting hot air. There are also other cooling techniques, such as liquid cooling.
All modern day processors are designed to cut out or reduce their voltage or clock speed if the internal temperature of the processor exceeds a specified limit. This is generally known as thermal throttling in the case of reduction of clock speeds, or thermal shutdown in the case of a complete shutdown of the device or system.
Cooling may be designed to reduce the ambient temperature within the case of a computer, such as by exhausting hot air, or to cool a single component or small area (spot cooling).
The public source identifies “Computer cooling” as removal of waste heat from a computer or computer component. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Computer, cooling and removal.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q840551. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Computer cooling” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.