Traditional Cooling:

According to CompTIA's A+ Guide to Hardware, by Jean Andrews (2007), the "system temperature" or the motherboard/frontside bus (RAM) should be under 100 degrees farenheit (38 degrees Celcius).

My computer is located on the loft of my apartment which in the summertime gets temperatures over 90 degrees even with a fan and the window open. As you can imagine it has been difficult for my computer to maintain stable temperatures, I've had issues with hard drives CPU & RAM which caused slowdown and crashes.

Temperature Breakdown:
Not all PC components can sustain the same temperatures, below is a chart with the reccomended maximum temperatures of PC components.

Component	Max Temp F	Max Temp C
CPU	140	60
Video Card	131	55
Hard Drives	131	55
System Bus	100	38

Due to the causes of heat, mechanical motion and lack of space/syncs (heat dissipation), the risk of PC components is not necessarily in the above order. Depending on the set-up of the computer and the enviornment it is located, one component may be at greater risk than the other. However, as a rule of thumb, in most cases, the PC components are most at risk in the following order:

1. Hard Drives
2. System Bus (motherboard and RAM)
3. CPU
4. Video/Graphics Card
(This is generally under the assumption that the CPU has the reccomended heatsync/fan, the PC is not mostly for graphics and nothing is overclocked or tweaked...ie. a Dell Set-up)

In my case, even with the high ambient temperatures, the risk of my components appear to be in that order. So what's the solution? More cooling, deal with it and risk damage, or move the PC to another cooler location. I decided to go with more cooling. In the following pages I will show the temperatures of my computer parts and the cooling devices/methods I use to try and improve the problem.

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