Cooling your Custom Gaming Computer

All electronics get hot when they’re used. We all know this. The radios in our cars warm up, especially when we play a CD. Today’s car radios tend to be built in units, but if you have an earlier car and ever replaced the radio, you’ll see some heatsinks. Our smartphones, too, heat up, especially when we’re playing a game, watching a video or charging them.

It should be no surprise then, that our computers make lots of heat as well. If you’ve ever actually put your laptop on your lap while you’re using it you would have felt the heat (it’s even worse in shorts!). As our electronics move electrons around to process information, all that electricity generates heat. The more you use it and push it, the more heat it creates.

Custom gaming computers often feature top-of-the line components like graphics cards and processors. These are the parts that provide the gaming performance and also generate the most heat. These components are pushed to the edge of their capabilities when gamers fire up their favorite games like CS:GO or GTA V, and they always try to get the highest frame rate, the highest resolution, and the highest graphics quality.

So your computer gets hot, so what? Too much heat can actually damage the expensive components in your computer. When modern computer components detect too much heat they will first clock themselves down so they produce less heat, and then they will just turn off.

This begs the question: how do you cool your computer to prevent this? There are several cooling methods, and they are commonly used in conjunction in a single custom gaming pc. The first is called passive cooling. This is used when the component doesn’t get that warm, like a memory card or a network adapter, for example. This method uses something that is called a heatsink. A metal that is good at conducting heat, like copper, touches the hot component, and moves heat away from it. Sometimes if it moves it a great distance and the metal is long and thin, this is called a heat pipe. Heat pipes are commonly used in custom laptops. A heatsink has many prongs, slots or spikes to create lots of surface area. This creates more area for the heat to be dissipated into the surrounding air. Passive cooling is also used when you want to create a quiet or silent computer or device.

Another method for cooling is using fans. Fans are almost always used in conjunction with passive heating. As the heatsink transfers the heat away from the component and into the air, the fans move cool air into the computer and hot air out. There could also be dedicated fans that blow air on a heatsink of a specific component. CPU coolers and graphics cards often have dedicated fans.

The final method is liquid cooling. Instead of transferring the heat from the device to the air through a heatsink, the heat is transferred to a liquid coolant through a cooling block. The hot coolant is then pumped to a radiator where fans push air through a capillary-like mesh of tubes containing the coolant.