Updated 20 Jun, 2013, 1:21 pm IST

Crash-Proof Your PC!

24 Apr, 2007 | by Gaurav Seth

An easy guide to better case ventilation

Is your computer restarting in the middle of a gaming session or is your hard drive crashing too often? There may be a zillion reasons as to why that is happening but the biggest culprit most of the times is overheating i.e. your processor or your graphics card gets so hot that it has to shut itself down to prevent burning out. Again, there can be different reasons for overheating like a thermally inefficient architecture of the product itself (The Prescott range of Intel processors would run very hot and unless you had a good case with excellent ventilation you were sure to run into problems), a bad cooling set-up (heat sink and fan), this happens a lot in case of graphics cards where the board manufacturers use a substandard heat sink-fan assembly to cut costs and lastly and most importantly bad case ventilation.

We have to remember that the temperature of the components is directly proportional to the case temperature, (also known as ambient temperature) and higher the case temperature, higher would be the temperature of the internal components like the processor, motherboard, graphics card and hard drive. For example, a ceiling fan in a room with cross ventilation will be able to cool the room faster than the same ceiling fan in a room with little or no ventilation. So the bottom line is, we have to ensure that the case is well ventilated. And that’s exactly what we are going to show you in following article using simple and cost effective methods.

Before we start we would like you to understand these points. A processor when not doing much work is in a 'idle' state. When its doing heavy duty work like encoding a movie or playing a game, it would be in the 'load' state. You can get an idea of how much work the CPU is doing by looking at the 'CPU Usage' graph under 'Windows Task Manager'.

A processor runs at a higher temperature in load state. Generally under ideal conditions the processor idles at 35-45 degrees and goes up to 55-60 degrees under load. Similarly for a graphic card, the card is under load while playing an intensive 3D game like F.E.A.R or Far Cry. Under ideal conditions a graphic card would generally idle at 50-60 degrees and go up to 75-80 under load.

Page 1:Introduction~ Choose the right case~ Choose the right case... contd~ Decide the Pressure set-up~ Cable management~ Practical Tests and Conclusion

Tags: CFM , ventilation , Vantec