I must not overheat.
Heat is the chip-killer.
Heat is the thermal death that brings total obliteration.
And when it comes, I will turn the fans on to speed its path.
Where the heat has gone, there will be processing.
Only my FPS will remain.

Last week, we talked about the importance of feeding enough watts to your components to allow them to perform their best. The other side of that coin is dealing with the waste heat that is a byproduct of all that high-speed math. Heat's pretty much as far down the entropy scale as you can get -- most of what we do turns organized energy, one way or another, into heat. The problem with this state of affairs, at least for electronics, is that they are happier the colder their environment is.
If you're like us here at BI, you'll want to keep tabs on how good a job your cooling solution is working... before something locks up, melts, or lets the magic smoke out. Fortunately, there are a lot of monitoring tools at our disposal, in addition to self-protection circuitry and sensors in today's CPUs and most current BIOS implementations that will either slow things down, or shut them off completely before a catastrophic heat event takes place.

It is incumbent upon us to make the millions (or billions) of transistors in our small, rectangular minions happy by keeping them at a sane temperature. This means we'll need to be moving heat away from the hottest, most expensive bits, and then getting it the hell out of the box.

The first part is done by the heatsink and fan combo (commonly abbreviated HSF). Affixed directly to the video card, motherboard chipset, or installed on our CPU, this is typically a many-finned feat of engineering wrought in aluminum, copper, and occasionally something more exotic, and sporting a fan or two. The simplified name of the game here is air flow and surface area. The bigger the thermal delta between the cooling surfaces and the transistors supplying the heat, the faster that temperature will try to equalize, wicking heat away from that fragile, temperamental bit of silicon.

"Temperamental"? Anthropomorphize much?