What is a Heatsink?

M

medway

New Member
Me and my nephew are building a computer from scratch. Since I have always considered myself more of a "computer wanna be", this should be interesting.

I keep reading references on forums to heatsinks. Can someone tell me what they are and how important they are in regards to building a computer?
 
Ok your first post was at 7:17am and your next post 7:21AM, give people time to respond, not to mention most people arent up yet, and the search bar is your friend if you need help as is google. Here is what a Heatsink is http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/h/heat_sink.html

and another helpful def of it
http://heat-sinks.globalspec.com/

Let me put it this way if you dont have a good heat sink you can kiss your computer good bye rather fast, because your processor WILL fry
 
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Medway, if you are giving such questions, perhaps you should'nt built the computer yoursef, you should learn more about computers. You can take a socket AM2 motherboard and buy Intel celeron 355 3.33GHz for gaming or something like that ;)
 
Heatsinks are on various components, mainly on the CPU, Chipset, and Video Card.

The majority of the time all the components except for the CPU come with heatsinks pre-installed, and if you buy a retail CPU, they come with heatsinks.
 
really all it is, is a metal object, thats extracts heat from the CPU (processor), then the fan blow the heat away from it, keeping your computer/cpu cool, and crashing-free :P.
 
And they generally look something like this.

If you're computer has a processor that has been out for anything between 1 week to 10 years, a heatsink is VERY important. I think it's only pentium 1's that can run without heatsinks.
 
thealmightyone said:
I think it's only pentium 1's that can run without heatsinks.
Click to expand...
Bzzt! My 133MHz P1 has one, a big spiky passive thing. Maybe 386's don't have 'em, I'm not sure.
Tom
 
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