Kings of Cooling
NO MATTER HOW you look at computing performance, it always boils down to electricity, tolerances, and heat. Those three factors have stymied unlimited power over the years. Diminishing returns are rife within this enthusiast hobby of ours. As transistor count goes up, gate width decreases, more voltage is applied, and heat increases, the need to cool components becomes more important to ensure they remain within their operating temperatures. To draw heat away from the processor and into something that can dissipate it into the open air has been of prime importance since the personal computer became a thing—in fact, even before that, with supercomputers.
The basic principle behind cooling any PC component is that you need a form of heat exchange to take heat from the system and dump it into the surrounding environment. Nowadays, you have a handful of options. Firstly, you could go with low-powered, efficient components (such as the Raspberry Pi), which can be
