Xclio PSU Doctor and Port Tester

The modern PC is potentially a mass of heat output and heat production hot spots. With CPUs rated at more than 100W of heat output, single graphics boards carrying similar ratings (and people want to run two!), multiple hard drives the norm, lots of memory and mainboards covered in heatpipes to combat toasty core logic and PWM circuits, a PC appreciably warming up a room when it’s working hard is no joke.

There's more choice than ever before, but which computer case is right for you and which features should you look out for?

Watercooling for the PC has been around for years in some form or another, for at least as long as Scan have been in business, with basic physics defining why you want to use it. That means for air cooling, to cope with increasing temperature in the heatsink you need to move the air across it faster. That is why thermostatically controlled fans in your PC will turn faster the hotter something gets.

This TekSpek explains what Green Computing is, what it means to the consumer, and how energy-efficient components can be beneficial in the home.

Conceived back in 2004 and brought to market just a year later, the 80 PLUS initiative is one of many standards introduced in an effort to increase energy efficiency in modern technology. Targeting computer power supplies, it awards PSUs that are able to achieve an energy efficiency of over 80 per cent at varying workloads and a power factor of 0.9 or more at 100 per cent load.

Let's face it, power-supply units (PSUs) are boring. Presented in what's usually a mundane box spitting cables from one end, this is a product that's neither aesthetically pleasing nor technically interesting to the majority of self-builders.