MAXIMUMPC july 2007
Unless you’re running your rig in a
refrigerator, the fi rst law of geek life
reads as follows: Computers are
warm. And onto that, Maximum PC
extends the corollary that as a PC’s
guts get faster, temperatures will only
get hotter. And hotter. And then you
upgrade your rig again, and you fi nd
yourself just three degrees shy of
slathering your CPU with butter and
using its four cores to make a morn-
ing omelet rather than animate your
Supreme Commander armies.
But while conventional wisdom
might tell us that more case fans
equals more cooling, that handy
mantra hardly reveals the real truth
about what goes on inside your
case. You don’t need a hurricane to
chill your machine, nor do all setups
benefi t equally from an abundance
of fans. Effi ciency is every bit as
important as eagerness when it
comes to cooling, unless you’re
planning to turn your basement into
a wind tunnel and restock the ice
buckets every 15 minutes.
So what, then, is one to do?
Far be it from us to simply toss up
the standard cooling clichés. Much
as it pains us to say it, water cooling
isn’t a solution for most folks. And
electricity costs what they are, we’renot about to suggest mounting an air
conditioner to the side of your rig. But
we’ve done one better. After much
pleading and promises that the oft-clumsy author of this article would be
carefully supervised, our friends at
Fluke set us up with a super-duper-
fancy thermal-imaging camera.
In short, we pointed the camera at
just about everything we could get our
hands on to take full advantage of its
Predator-style heat vision, but you’ll
be most interested in our views of
three common types of rigs—an aver-
age gaming rig, an uber-enthusiast
PC, and a media center machine. The
thermal imager let us precisely mea-
sure the temperature of every area in
these PCs. For as fun as it would be
to say that fans make the red areas
turn blue, we didn’t want to use mere
ballpark estimates to optimize the
cooling on these rigs.
That means we’re not only taking
a look at the problematic hotspots,
but also assessing the actual perfor-
mance of cooling solutions across
specifi c areas of each machine. We’d
much rather reassign a fan to a place
where it’s needed than overcool a
location that doesn’t need the air. But
don’t let us spoil the ending. We shot
before and after thermal photos of our
tweaks, so you can see the differ-
ences for yourself. We also highlight-
ed key areas that either need more
work or can simply be ignored.M
aster’s
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uide
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Cooling
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to
THAT’S HOT!
BY DAVID MURPHYWe’re busting out the thermal camera to
show you what’s hot or not in your PC—and what you
should do to fi x your rig’s trouble spots
We used Fluke’s
IR FlexCam
Thermal Imager
to capture the
heat-related images in this fea-
ture. The Ti55 records its tem-
perature shots at a 320x240 reso-
lution, which we then pulled into
Fluke’s SmartView image-editing
application. This allowed us to set
all the pictures to a default tem-
perature scale for each system,
ensuring that the dark purple, for
instance, in one image represent-
ed an identical temperature
in all other shots.