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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.

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 AMD’s AMD64 CPU instruction set architecture (ISA) is, shows what CPUs implement it from both AMD and Intel, and explains what software is available to run on those 64-bit consumer processors.

There’s been a lot of hype about Intel’s Core 2 recently, even since they launched Core in fact. Words like Conroe, Badaxe and Allendale have been flying around. The bottom line is that Core 2 is the name of Intel’s latest line of CPUs, based on a new micro-architecture, designed for speed and efficiency.

Intel’s been on a mission of late. That mission revolves around grouping and standardising key technologies under various banners that are designed to ensure hardware compatibility and consumer ease of use. We’ll take a closer look at three such technologies that fall under the headings of Centrino, Viiv, and vPro, respectively.

The purpose of this TekSpek is to delineate the publicly known features of Intel’s next generation desktop microarchitecture. Codenamed Conroe and officially titled Intel Core 2 Duo, it’s loosely based on the current mobile Yonah (Core Duo) underpinnings.

This TekSpek explains why you’d want to overclock your graphics board, the risks in doing so and how you can go about doing it.

Anybody who has been near their share of computer systems will appreciate that not all systems make the same amount of noise. There are a number of reasons for why this is so. Firstly, a computer makes noise for different reasons. Generally, anything mechanical is going to make noise.