Investigation of CPU Thermal Solution Designs for BTX Desktop System

Along with the ever increasing in CPU performance, the corresponding heat load climbs up significantly. For the personal computer with strict geometric constraints, the thermal management needs to be considered at the system level, instead of the component level. Especially in a system with BTX layout, the CPU and chipsets are aligned with the system fan. The geometry of CPU heat sink is inclined to affect the downstream airflow distribution. The variation in CPU heat sink designs not only changes the CPU operating temperature but also the temperatures of other key semiconductor components downstream, such as chipsets and memory sticks. Currently, based on existing thermal techniques including extrusion, cold forging, folded fin, stacked fin, heat pipe integrated heat sink and liquid cooling, the thermal management solutions could be properly tailored for personal computers with various hardware settings, if a guideline of BTX thermal solution and the ultimate limit of the current cooling methods are available. It is imperative to conduct a detailed study on the thermal performances of existing heat sink designs and their associated airflow distribution in BTX systems. In this investigation, a series of thermal solutions have been investigated through both experiment and CFD simulations for a typical BTX system and a rough roadmap has been figured out. The influence of CPU heat sink designs on system thermal performance is also discussed at the system level.