Computer cooling is required to remove the waste heat produced by computer components, to keep components within permissible operating temperature limits. Components that are susceptible to temporary malfunction or permanent failure if overheated include integrated circuits such as central processing units (CPUs), chipsets, graphics cards, hard disk drives, and solid state drives.
A finned air-cooled heatsink with fan clipped onto a CPU, with a smaller passive heatsink without fan in the background
A 3-fan heatsink mounted on a video card to maximize cooling efficiency of the GPU and surrounding components
Commodore 128DCR computer's switch-mode power supply, with a user-installed 60 mm cooling fan. Vertical aluminium profiles are used as heatsinks.
The dust buildup on this laptop CPU heatsink after three years of use has made the laptop unusable due to frequent thermal shutdowns.
Computer hardware includes the physical parts of a computer, such as the central processing unit (CPU), random access memory (RAM), motherboard, computer data storage, graphics card, sound card, and computer case. It includes external devices such as a monitor, mouse, keyboard, and speakers.
PDP-11 CPU board
Inside a custom-built computer: power supply at the bottom has its own cooling fan
Computer motherboard
An IBM System z9 mainframe