Rather than getting smaller and smaller the world of the PC seems to have been going in much the opposite direction. We now see systems actually increasing in size, most notably with Pentium2-3's and Athlon (K7) CPU's and respective motherboards. This tends to mean that at the same time as silicone shrinks it also gets more instructions and features added to it and added to it at a rate that exceeds that of the shrinkage.

Thus there is a still ever present demand for the need to cool your oversized systems more and more. Like trying to fry a mountain gorilla on a stove that was previously only built for smaller monkeys. You have to have a cooler to cope.

Fans are what it's all about

Personally we rarely bother with any kind of none standard cooling unless it's on a chipset that actually gets hot (Athlon). The only reason you actually need a 3rd party cooler nowadays is simply to cope with overclocking. Such methods can cause CPUs to run at greater speeds than normal and thus results in higher heat output from the circuits. In comes the team behind many cooling devices, 'The Card Cooler'.

At first glance the 'Thin Fin PIII Cooler' looks a little like any ordinary Pentium3 fan, although it's new design and more powerful fan can easily knock a few degrees off the temperature of a CPU without problem. Its specs are:

Application: P3-450 & Up
Thermal Resistance: .59 C/W
Heat Sink Dimensions: 135 x 48 x 25mm
Fan Dimensions: 50 x 50 x 10 ball bearing
Air Flow: 13 CFM
Speed: 5800RPM
Noise Level: 28.9 dBA
Input Requirement: 12V DC @ .09A
MTBF: 42,000 Hours
Cost: $19.00

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