The noise emitted from a fan fitted inside a computer is one of the reasons for irritation and disturbance when you try hard to concentrate on important things while working on a computer. The noise from the fan becomes a common issue as your computer gets old. A computer can have many fans that can be source of disturbing noise. The heat sink is one fan that tends to become noisy as your system become old and components starts wearing out. The heat sink fan makes a grinding noise that can prove to be major disturbance when you want to concentrate. The only solution to this problem is replacing the heat sink fan with a new one. There has not been a major change in the heat sink design in many years. However, things are changing for better and now hardware components manufacturer have come up with a novel idea of fanless heat sinks and cooling system without fans. The new concept of heat sink relies on design itself to dissipate the heat generated by CPU, GPU and other components which are fitted with heat sink.
Heat sinks play an important role in keeping the processor cool by absorbing the heat and dissipating it. Generally, the metal heat sink is fitted with a fan which helps in dissipation of heat. The problems with older design of heat sink are the design causes formation of boundary layer of air that causes the air to remain closer to the outer part of heat sink. Therefore a fan is required to dissipate the heat that gets accumulated at boundary layer. The old heat sink design is inefficient to dissipate heat by itself and it has to rely on fan that needs power supply to run and protect the CPU from overheating.
The new heat sinks will not have a fan but the heat sink will rotate to dissipate the heat. The spinning heat sink will eliminate the formation of boundary layer and thus do away with the need of fan. The fanless heat sink will be so efficient that it will operate quietly and at low speeds and yet dissipate the heat. The fanless heat sink looks like a big, metal fan. The cooler has a static metal baseplate that is connected to the GPU, CPU or any object that needs cooling. The cooler also has a rotating heat exchanger that is cushioned by a thin layer of air. As the metal blades spin( the heat exchanger rotates) a centrifugal force is created which forces the hot air to move upwards which leads to cooling of the component. Another advantage of fanless heat sink is it also prevents build up of dust on the heat sink. The new fanless heat sink can be the technology processor manufacturers are waiting for. It may encourage the processor manufacturers to design chips beyond 3GHz clock speed as the cooling solution has already arrived.
