FS Cooling Guide: Video Cooling

Thank you for following along with our continued saga of cooling. If this is your first time, welcome! Please check out the Cooling Guide and the CPU Cooling Guide if you would like to get up to speed on what has already been discussed. If you've read parts 1 and 2, you'll know where this episode in the cooling trilogy is heading. The Cooling Guide covered the introduction to cooling technology. We talked about such things as how heatsinks and fans work, how they're designed, and what specific features to look for when shopping for a heatsink or fan. In the CPU Cooling Guide we discussed cooling of the CPU specifically. The CPU is a major heat generator in your system, so it has a lot of attention devoted to it from the cooling community. We also cited many specific models to show some of the large variety of heatsink and fan combinations for Slot-1, Socket-7, and Socket-370 platforms.

In this third part we are going to discuss the cooling of other devices in the system, namely video cards. The CPU was and still is a major heat producer. However, we've very recently seen that there are other components that produce enough heat that they deserve attention for cooling as well. Examples of such components are certain video card chipsets, which can really heat up after a few hours of deathmatch! All of this heat contributes to overall system heat in a closed-case environment, so video cooling is an important concern as well.