Two Unique Cooling Solutions for Your PC

Two Unique Cooling Solutions for Your PC

How long do you use your PC in a day? It is one of the things in your house that dumps out heat and easily heats up a small room. So make sure that all your air-conditioning units are working. There are a lot of companies offering AC repair services in Salt Lake City if you need them.

But can your computers run cooler? Their processors are one of the main producers of heat; they require an efficient way to dissipate it. There are two common ways to cool down a processor: air and water cooling. The former is straightforward. It involves a heatsink that draws the heat away from it, and then a fan cools it and pushes the heat away. The latter has a bit more options. You can get an all-in-one solution where you get a closed-loop system with the pump built-in and the radiator already fixed. Or you can make a custom one and include other components such as your video card in the loop. These can do an admirable job of keeping your CPUs cool.

Then you have the more extreme ones. Here are two cooling solutions that may just be out of this world:

Mineral Oil

If someone tells you that they have a PC that is water-cooled, show them this. This is liquid cooling in its most literal sense. With this method, the computer is submerged into a container filled with mineral oil. Not all of the components should be submerged, though—most notably the platter hard drives because of their tiny moving parts.

How does this work? Mineral oil is a non-conductive substance, so dipping your whole system in it will not cause any short circuit. You need a container that will contain your oil and PC and a radiator. Planning this is key because once you put your system in there, it will be a pain to take out.

Do a test fit of the container. If you think that all is well, complete the PC build and make sure that all the necessary cables are plugged in. USB and other ports will be difficult to access once the oil is there, so use extension cables if needed.

Once you complete the PC, you can proceed to put the oil in. You will also need a radiator, tubes, and some fans to circulate the oil. At this point, the build is completed. You can embellish it further by adding decorations in the container.

Phase Change Cooling

office with computers

As if mineral oil is not crazy enough, here comes phase-change cooling. It shares many of its principles with our trusty refrigerators. As the name implies, this is a process that requires the use of a phase-change material (PCM), or a refrigerant, which undergoes a phase change when it circulates the loop.

An evaporator pushes the PCM toward the copper block that is on the CPU. This turns the PCM from liquid to gas, to which it now draws the heat away from the block. A compressor then pushes the gas back into the loop, to which it turns back to liquid. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it cools down your system to sub-zero temperatures. This will let you overclock your CPU way beyond what air and water cooling allow.

If these two are too crazy for you, you can just do a bit of tweaking to your setup to improve things. You can move your PC near a window so that it can expel the heat outside. You can also try undervolting your CPU or video card if you don’t need that much power.

There are cooling options there for everyone. Try to explore what’s best for you and your PC.

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