Gadgetory

a common misconception among the tech community is that a system which calls itself using a liquid must be more efficient and therefore more powerful now obviously this isn't true you could liquid cool a graphing calculator not much what happened but why then do so many computer enthusiasts opt for water cooling solution and better yet why do CPUs and GPUs they take advantage of get so hot think of it this way almost all desktop great CPUs run hot under load just a fact of life that we all deal with Intel does offer laptop grade chips and chipsets like the Atom Bay Trail lineup but these are significantly underpowered and underutilized and even they get fairly warm so why well it all has to do believe it or not with thermodynamics the first law of thermodynamics states that heat is a form of energy and that all forms of energy can neither be created nor destroyed but rather transformed into other forms of energy ie electrical energy to mechanical energy and vice versa the second law of thermodynamics states the entropy that is the randomness of any cycle is always greater than or equal to a factor of zero this means that the disarray or inefficiency of a cycle cannot be reversed only restricted to zero or expressed as some value greater than zero so what do these two have to do with your computer well first off keep in mind your computer when powered on is always going to be hotter than it was when turned off in at room temperature essentially the second law decrees that your computer will never be 100% efficient and that energy losses in the form of heat are inevitable so when you push that power button and fire things up some amount of electrical energy supplied by your PSU will not make it to your CPU or graphics card on top of that a lot of energy that does make it to your CPU and GPU will be dissipated as heat as your chip processes data if you were to hold a thermal scope up to your computer tower or laptop you'd likely notice a vast majority of heat coming from one of two places either your central processing unit or your graphics processing unit but why in particular do these two get the hottest while processing units have a bunch of transistors packed inside of them imagine them as switches switching from an on state to an off state over and over again and in between each switching process there's a point at which each transistor acts like a resistor so when a single transistor inside of a CPU is in the on or off state current flows with relatively low resistance and now much heat is generally dissipated but as the transistor switches between the two states a current semi flows through it acting more like a resistor than anything else this is because the current travels partially through metal and partially through air resistors are designed to do one thing reduce the amount of current supplied Ohm's law denoted by the equation V equals IR can be re-expressed as I equals V over R where power or current denoted by I is directly proportional to the voltage of V supplied and indirectly proportional to the resistance R applied as resistance in any current increases the total current flow must decrease now recall the first law of thermodynamics since energy can neither be created nor destroyed the part of the electrical energy that was eliminated from the circuit by the series or parallel resistors present must be converted into another form of energy since there is no mechanical or chemical work to be done the electrical energy that was resisted by the resistors must convert into heat so in your CPU each switching stage inside of every resistor produces heat and there are over 1 billion transistors inside of each Intel Haswell processor as you may have also deduced by now the number of times the transistor switches between its on and off States is also directly linked to how much heat is given off if transistor a and transistor B are entirely the same and transistor a switches more times per second than transistor B as long as the same current is applied to both then transistor a will consequently release more heat kind of cool huh well maybe not in practice but in theory it's pretty neat now when overclocking CPU or GPU you're essentially increasing the number of electrical pulses that each transistor receives this increases the number of switches between the on and off states and therefore increases the total heat output this is why so many overclocking computer enthusiasts insist on installing water cooling units water has a very high heat capacity and therefore is capable of transporting large amounts of heat without changing its own temperature very much at all so there you have it CPUs and GPUs get hot because of partial resistance and therefore often times require unorthodox measures to keep them within their operating temperature limits and I say I'm Orthodox because while electricity and water generally don't work well together it's kind of cool nowadays to see computers and their builders utilizing such opposing forces for greater good this is science studio thanks for learning with us