Effect of RAM amount on the thermal behavior of CPU operating under a heavy computational load

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of different RAM amount and fan failure on bulk CPU temperature rises while operating under a heavy computational load. Two sets of experiments, each with varying amounts of RAM were carried out under CPU cooling fan-on and fan-off conditions. A personal computer with an Intel Pentium III CPU was used to conduct the experiments. The computational load was the multiplication of two dimensional matrices (3100 by 3100) containing double precision numbers. To monitor temperature rises, sensitive thermocouples were installed on the CPU heat-sink, the RAM module, and the hard disk. This paper demonstrates that CPU temperature increases as more RAM becomes available to perform the computation. The authors hypothesize that the increase in CPU temperature is correlated to full CPU utilization to carry out a heavy computational load.