Fanless Computer Cooling Techniques

Most computers use one or more internal fans to keep their components from overheating. However, fans have some disadvantages; they make noise, use electricity, and occasionally require cleaning. Some computers use fanless cooling techniques, and there are also ways to reduce the amount of internal cooling which is necessary. The most common fanless methods for keeping computers cool are either vent- or water-based.

WATER COOLING: A type of fanless computer cooling which has become somewhat more common in recent years, water cooling keeps components cool by running water or other liquids through tubes alongside them. According to wikipedia.org, computer systems available with water cooling include the Dell XPS and Apple Power Macintosh G5. It also indicates that water cooling techniques reduce noise and can be useful for CPU "overclocking."

VENT COOLING: A few computers use only air vents for cooling, not needing any sort of powered equipment for this purpose. Most of these are older (mostly pre-386) systems, pocket computers, or devices which perform computing but generally aren't thought of as computers; electronic organizers, video game systems, etc. Some older fanless computers need to have a fan added if they are heavily upgraded. Several different Apple computer models only use vents to keep their temperature low, including some iMac models and the Apple Power Macintosh G4 Cube, according to wikipedia.org. Care must be taken not to block the vents of such computer systems.

EXTERNAL COOLING: Making the temperature in the room a computer is located in lower will reduce how much or how fast its fan(s) have to run, if it has variable-speed fans like most computers do. Some computers (like my old Compaq Elite laptop) can keep their fans off most of the time during the non-summer months. Placing the computer away from sources of heat (other computer equipment, appliances, heat registers, etc.) will also help reduce the amount of cooling necessary.

Overall, fanless cooling techniques are used to cool only a small minority of personal computers, but offer benefits with regard to energy consumption and/or quietness. However, computer systems which use such techniques tend to be more expensive or have less internal upgradability. While water and other fluid cooling techniques have become more common, vent-based fanless cooling was much more widespread during the 1980s through early '90s, on computers like the TRS-80 Color Computer series, Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, Tandy 1000 RL, and Macintosh 128K. To be very quiet, a fanless computer should have a relatively low-noise hard drive as well.