The thermal design power is the maximum amount of power the thermal solution is required to dissipate. The thermal solution must be designed to dissipate the TDP (thermal design power) without exceeding the maximum Tjunction specification. TDPmax represents the total power dissipation of the processor while executing a worst-case instruction mix at nominal voltages and normal operating conditions. The goal of every thermal design must be to dissipate TDPmax and avoid reaching Tjunction with a safe margin. With the increase of the voltage the heat dissipation of the CPU is also increased....

But TDP measures power dissipation , not consumption, AMD claims, as part of its campaign to re-educate Intel's would-be customers on the eve of that company's most critical product launch ever.. In the definition of the term , TDP is "the maximum amount of power the thermal solution is required to dissipate." In other words, TDP is a benchmark figure relative to how a cooling device, such as a heat sink or a fan, dissipates heat. Its original intent was to show the maximal power consumption that a physical system could withstand and still dissipate heat at necessary levels. But as Uwe W. D. Weyden wrote for us almost six years ago, "CPU vendors provide the values TDPmax and TDPtyp to the designers" - meaning, the maximal level of heat dissipation and the typical level under normal loads....

Graphics processors have passed CPUs in terms of both transistor count and heat dissipation, making a proper graphics cooling solution a must-have for enthusiasts. All cooling devices are based on the principle of dissipating heat by means of adequate heat conducting substances. But no matter what you do, that heat eventually has to be dissipated to the ambient air, which is why fans are indispensable. Even so, a fan is required to exchange the surrounding air quickly enough to dissipate heat effectively. Think of the whole cooling process as a cascaded solution: the waterblock heats up quickly, but dissipates its heat to the liquid coolant right away, which is why it is essential to maintain a steady flow....

And, while manufacturers try to keep down power loss by constantly miniaturizing the processor structures (smaller transistors switch at lower voltages, which means they dissipate less power), they continue to cram ever more transistors onto rapidly shrinking surfaces. As a result, the specific power dissipation of today's processors has mushroomed. So the moral of the story is that many a little makes a lot - in this case, a lot of heat that desperately needs to be dissipated....

The golden surface in the top area of the modules are copper planes that are used to dissipate heat from the PCB to the aluminium heat spreaders that are placed in between the conventional, black memory heat spreaders. These so-called heat spreaders are attached directly to the DRAM chips to provide a larger overall surface for the purpose of efficient heat dissipation. As only highest speeds at high voltages benefit from memory cooling (a large percentage of heat generated by DRAM chips is dissipated through the memory circuit board anyway), the impact of different heat spreaders typically is hard to measure. Corsair' Dominator tries to maximize memory cooling by combining the two ways heat dissipates from a memory module....