What is a Heat Sink, and How Does it Work?
A computer’s CPU (central processing unit) is often prone to overheating because some of its components overheat, posing risks to the entire computer’s functionality.
In this blog, you’ll learn how heat sinks help protect your computer’s CPU from overheating, ensuring maximum efficiency and the protection of critical parts and components.
What is a heat sink?
A heat sink is a piece of metal that sits on top of a computer chip such as a CPU and draws power away from components by letting it rise through a series of fins.
By themselves, heat sinks are passive, meaning they have no moving parts. In most cases, however, the heatsink is combined with a fan that blows the hot air away or a liquid cooling solution that carries the heat halfway through the pipes.
What is the purpose of a heat sink?
A CPU is prone to overheating because some of its components product heat. Without the heatsink, the heat generated by the components stay in your CPU, which will burn or fry it.
Because most components are made of electronic chips, they absorb heat easily. If they receive too much heat, they become damaged and, therefore, useless, posing a risk to the functionality of high-performance computers.
Having a heat sink is critical because it helps your CPU cool even if you use it for a long period of time. It is designed to absorb the heat coming from your CPU then disperse the heat away from its components. The dissipation of heat is possible because a heat sink has fins, which gives more surface area during a heat transfer.
A heat sink needs to make strong contact with the source of heat in order to maximize cooling. Heat sinks use a thermal conductor to move the heat into fins, which have larger surface areas and thus disperse heat throughout the computer.
How does a heat sink work?
A heat sink works by moving heat away from a critical component. This is done in four basic steps:
- The source generates heat: This source may be any system that creates heat and requires the removal of said heat to function accordingly, such as mechanical, electrical, chemical, nuclear, solar, and friction.
- Heat transfers away from the source: In direct heat sink-contact applications, heat moves into the heat sink and away from the source via natural conduction. The heat sink material’s thermal conductivity directly impacts this process. That is why high thermal conductivity materials such as copper and aluminum are extremely common in the construction of heat sinks.
- Heat distributes throughout the heat sinks: Heat will naturally travel through the heat sink via natural conduction moving across the thermal gradient from a high-temperature to a low-temperature environment. This ultimately means that the heat sink’s thermal profile will not be consistent. As a result, heat sinks will often be hotter towards the source and cooler towards the sink’s extremities.
- Heat moves away from the heat sink: This process relies on the heat sink’s temperature gradient and its working fluid—most commonly air or a non-electrically-conductive liquid.
- The working fluid passes across the surface of the warm heat sink and utilizes thermal diffusion and convection to remove heat away from the surface and into the surrounding environment.
- This stage relies on, yet again, a temperature gradient to remove heat from the heat sink. Therefore, if the surrounding temperature is not cooler than the heat sink, no convection and subsequent heat removal will occur.
- This stage is also where the total surface area of the heat sink becomes most advantageous. A large surface area provides an increased area for thermal diffusion and convection to occur.
Source: researchgate.net . A heat sinks moves heat away from a critical component. This is done in four basic steps: the source generating heat, transferring heat away from the source, heat distributing through the heat sink, and heat moving away from the heat sink.
What are the types of heat sinks?
There are three types of heat sinks: passive, active, and hybrid.
Passive heat sinks
Passive heat sinks rely on natural convection, meaning the buoyancy of hot air alone causes the airflow generated across the heat sink system. The benefit of these types of heat sinks is that they do not require secondary power or control systems to remove heat from the system. However, passive heat sinks are less effective at transferring heat from a system than active heat sinks.
Source: easytechjunkie.com. Passive heat sinks rely on natural convection, meaning the buoyancy of hot air alone causes the airflow generated across the heat sink system.
Active heat sinks
Active heat sinks utilize forced air to increase fluid flow across the hot area. Forced air is most commonly generated by a fan, blower, or even movement of the entire object.
An example of a fan producing forced air across a heat sink is the fan in your personal computer turning on after your computer gets warm.
The fan forces air across the heat sink, which allows more unheated air to move across the heat sink surface, thus increasing the total thermal gradient across the heat sink system and allowing more heat to exit the overall system.
Source: amazeinvent.com. Active heat sinks use forced air to increase fluid flow across the hot area.
Hybrid heat sinks
Hybrid heat sinks combine some aspects of passive and active heat sinks. These configurations are less common, and they often rely on control systems to cool the system based on temperature requirements.
When the system operates at cooler levels, the forced air source is inactive, only cooling the system passively. Once the source reaches higher temperatures, the active cooling mechanism engages to increase the cooling capacity of the system.
Source: impact-innovations.com. Hybrid heat sinks combine some aspects of passive and active heat sinks.
What is heat sink compound?
Heat sink compound—also known as thermal grease, thermal compound, CPU grease, heat paste, heat sink paste, and thermal interface material—is a stick paste that is used as an interface between CPU heat sinks and heat sources.
Heat sink compound is used to fill gaps between the CPU or other heat generating components and the mechanical heat sink. The mechanical heat sink is placed over the CPU. Heat is drawn from the CPU though the mechanical heat sinks to its fins, where a fan blows air through to dissipate the excess heat.
Source: techspray.com. Heat sink compound is a stick paste that is used as an interface between CPU heat sinks and heat sources.
Final thoughts
Heat sinks play a critical part in dispersing heat away from a CPU and avoiding overheating, guarding the physical surfaces of critical parts and components.
With an overheated CPU, a computer’s functionality is compromised, impeding performance when and where it matters most.
At Trenton, our boards are equipped with custom and standard heat sinks and blower fans from Dynatron to reduce the heat on the components and system holistically.
Our engineers spend countless hours configuring a solution with the best cooling setup to extract heat and route it out of the chassis for optimal performance across all environments.
We also perform thermal chamber testing on our parts and components in-house to ensure our systems meet the stringent standards and requirements of our military customers.
This is why a high-quality heat sink is important, whether in active, passive, or hybrid form, as it protects the central component of a computer’s infrastructure, ensuring maximum efficiency at all times.
What is a Heatsink? Does My Computer Need One?
How well do you know your computer hardware? It’s a sure bet that you’ve heard of hard drives, processors, and RAM before, as they’re the main selling points for computers. If you dig further into computer hardware, you’ll also learn about graphics cards and their role. But what about heatsinks – do you know what they are?
In truth, heatsinks don’t come up a lot during hardware discussions. It’s not really something you’d buy a PC around, either! There’s a good chance that people who are new to PCs or haven’t explored the inside of their own, probably don’t know what a heatsink is exactly.
So, what is a heatsink, and what does it do for your computer?
What is a Heatsink?
The role of the heatsink can be found in its own name; it’s a device that’s designed to extract heat away from vital components in your computer. While running, your computer’s hardware gets very hot, and the objective of the heatsink is to take the heat away and dissipate it before the components overheat. They’re most often found on processors and graphics cards, which are some of the bigger heat producers in your PC. Given how these components are very expensive in the higher ranges, keeping them cool is top priority!
Heatsinks come in an array of methods for dissipating heat.
Passive Heatsinks
Passive heatsinks look kind of like a radiator. Their conductive material means they can easily take the heat away from the components that need cooling down. These kinds of heatsinks are very reliable as they cannot technically break down. Also, due to the lack of fan, they provide a silent cooling solution for hardware.
Unfortunately, due to the lack of fan, it has to cover a large surface area to help remove the heat. Passive heatsinks need decent room and a good air flow to ensure that they works optimally.
Active Heatsinks
Active heatsinks are far more commonplace in computers. They not only take the heat away but also dissipate it themselves, allowing them to work pretty much independently. The most common kind of active heatsink uses a fan to get rid of the heat. In an ideal situation, these fans blow the heat into an air flow, which then carries the heat out of the machine. They’re very effective just by themselves, but if the fan malfunctions or becomes clogged with dust, its efficiency drops by quite a lot.
Computing experts, particularly those who use their components to the extreme, will sometimes opt for liquid cooling. This is when components are cooled using a flow of contained coolant which takes the heat away from the processor. The coolant then carries and deposits this heat to a radiator which is cooled by a fan.
They’re powerful at removing heat but also quite expensive and tricky to set up. Don’t worry about using one if you’re just starting out with computers.
Do Computers Need One?
Now that we know what a heatsink does, the question stands: does a computer need one? Are these essential hardware for a computer, or are they simply accessories for people who find their processors are running hot?
The short answer is: yes, definitely! Computers always need a properly-working and seated heatsink to work efficiently.
The long answer is this: The processors we have in our computers and laptops today are powerful and generate a lot of heat as a result. If you removed the heatsink from a computer and booted it, you’ll probably see it work from few seconds to a minute before the computer shuts itself off. This is because the processor has reached critical heat levels and caused a sudden computer shutdown. If you’re “lucky”, it’ll be because the processor has a built-in safety catch to prevent itself from burning out.
If you’re not, the processor is now fried and unusable!
This is why when a user discovers their processor or graphics card is getting very hot, a common troubleshooting solution is to check the fans on it. If the heatsink is not functioning optimally, the processors will begin to overheat which will cause freezes, BSODs and sudden shutdowns and restarts. Some issues people will find with their heatsink is that it’s not “seated” properly (that is, they’re not tightly placed against the processor), that it’s clogged with dust, that its thermal paste is getting old, or the fan itself is simply giving up.
What About “Thermal Paste”?
You may have noticed a new terminology at the end of the last paragraph: “Thermal paste.” Given how they’re crucial for helping a heatsink do its job, let’s explore what thermal paste is. When attaching a heatsink to a processor, the contact surfaces of both won’t be perfectly flat, which will allow air to get between the two. Air is a bad heat conductor, so it will hinder the heatsink’s ability to extract heat, almost acting like a blanket on top of the processor.
By using thermal paste, you clog up the little gaps so that the seal between the heatsink and the processor is perfect. Thermal paste is specifically designed to conduct heat very well, so it acts at a much better heat transfer rate than air. This is why, when the paste gets old and less efficient, components begin to heat up a little. Always make sure there’s thermal paste applied when installing a heatsink – it’s essential for it to run at its maximum efficiency!
How Do Phones Stay Cool?
Throughout this article we’ve been discussing how heatsinks are essential for processors to prevent them from overheating. Despite this, when was the last time you remember a phone or a tablet needing an internal fan to keep cool? While some phones and tablets may have some way of dissipating heat, it’s nothing like the sort of hardware we see in a PC or laptop. How come mobile devices don’t really need heatsinks, while computers and laptops must have one?
The answer is quite simple: Phones and tablets use different processors than PCs.
It’s easy to look at a phone’s quad-core processor and assume it’s the same as a quad-core desktop processor. While the core numbers may be the same, don’t be fooled – the architecture is completely different! Mobile processors have been specifically designed with two features in mind:
- to run as cool as possible
- to drain the battery as little as possible
After all, you don’t want a processor that drains the battery after minutes of use!
So how come we don’t use these efficient processors in computers and laptops, too? Well, having a processor work with less heat and power doesn’t come for free. In order to do this, we have to sacrifice the power these processors can work at. This means mobile processors are much weaker than their bigger counterparts and aren’t suited for more CPU-intensive tasks we can otherwise perform on PCs without issue.
Sinking Feeling
The heatsink is one of the least-discussed pieces of hardware in a computer. Despite this, it’s a vital component to keep a PC stable and healthy.
Hopefully you’re now better versed in what heatsinks are, why they’re vital, and how they’re used in a computer.
Have you built your own PC before? If so, how much attention do you give the heatsink? Do you go for top quality and price, or do the cheaper models work fine for you? Let us know below.
Simon Batt
Simon Batt is a Computer Science graduate with a passion for cybersecurity.
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