It's Getting Hot in Here: The Horror of PC Overheating | Computer ...

Guest post by Jennifer.

As the hardware associated with personal computing gets more advanced, engineers and developers are concerned about the rising temperatures.

Silicon Valley, Northern California and the Pacific Northwest are all regions that have been made notable for the amount of high technology companies that have established their headquarters therein. In California, Facebook is in Menlo Park and Google in Mountain View; in Washington, the main offices of Microsoft are located in Redmond. These areas are known for their temperate weather and their high quality of life, and yet those companies are seeking to set up shop in some of the coldest, most desolate regions of the world.

In Sweden, online social networking colossus Facebook is expanding to Lulea, a town located less than 100 miles away from the Arctic Circle. Search engine giant Google announced last year that it had moved some assets to a large structure that once housed a paper mill in Hamina, Finland. In 2009, Microsoft established a presence in a chilly, although a lot more livelier, city: Dublin, Ireland.

What is attracting these Internet and technology giants to these regions? Facebook and Google may be interested in Scandinavian culture, and Microsoft might be looking for the luck of the Irish to bolster their bottom line even more, but what these companies have in common are gigantic data centers or server farms that normally run scorching hot. Moving some of their operations to chilly climates help keep their hardware cool and their crucial data safe.

The Dangers of Overheating

Just about any piece of hardware equipped with a central processing unit (CPU) will generate heat. In the case of the server farms of Facebook, Google and Microsoft, the heat produced by their hardware components is impressive. The current trend of cloud computing demands more processing power from data centers, and thus today?s servers are approximating the CPU power of supercomputers -meaning that they get extremely hot and thus can be more efficiently housed in colder climate regions like Dublin, Lulea and Hamina.

Personal computing devices are no stranger to high temperatures. The average temperature of an AMD Athlon 64 is between 90 to 95 Celsius while an Intel Celeron can get as hot 85 degrees Celsius. The mobile versions of those chips run even hotter, averaging 100 degrees- the temperature at which water reaches its boiling point; for this reason desktop and laptop computers have built-in cooling devices, such as fans, to cool them down. In the case of mobile computing devices, most smartphones and tablets do not have built-in cooling fans. While the chipset architecture of these mobile devices is designed to emit less heat than their desktop and laptop counterparts, overheating is still a dangerous issue, particularly when they are left unattended in close proximity of flammable materials. News reports of laptops and tablets that have caught on fire after they were left unattended on a couch or a bed are a clear reminder that these devices are prone to overheating.

[Read also: Maintaining Your Computer Saves You Money on Repairs and New Purchases]

Cooling Solutions

It?s not just the fire hazard that is a concern. When a personal computing system overheats, all the information stored therein could be lost forever, another reason why disaster recovery plan is so important perhaps. Hardware manufacturers and distributors of accessories are coming up with sensible solutions to keep computing devices cool without having to move to Alaska. There are a few cooling solutions on the market these days. Some computer makers are adding more air vents to their cases, and some manufacturers of high-end desktop and laptop computers specially built for gamers have sophisticated liquid cooling systems. Laptops and other mobile computers can be prevented from overheating with special cooling pads and external fans than can be attached to the device for cooling on the go.

Here are other viable solutions that were honored with an Innovation Award at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show:

Maingear Shift Performance Desktop PC

By rotating the internal components by 90 degrees, this desktop takes advantage of the physical properties of heat. The layout of the Maingear Shift allows hot air to escape through the roof of the computer case.

MSI N460GTX Hawk Graphics Card

MSI is mostly known as a netbook manufacturer, but its foray into high-performance graphics cards features an innovative way of keeping these devices cool even when gamers decide to overclock their systems. MSI?s Hawk graphics card is overclocked right out of the box, and it is protected against overheating by built-in twin fans and heat pipes.

SilverStone Fortress FT03 Desktop PC

This powerful desktop would normally require large noisy fans or a liquid cooling system to avoid overheating, but by simply rotating the internal components 90 degrees and strategically placing air vents that allow heat to rise and escape, the SilverStone Fortress FT03 manages to keep cool without consuming too much energy.

[Read also: Is This The End of the Desktop and Laptop?]

About the author :?Jennifer wrote this article on behalf of First to Know where you can find a wealth of information on a diverse array of topics.

Source: http://www.computerhowtoguide.com/2012/09/its-getting-hot-in-here-the-horror-of-pc-overheating.html

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