When you are using your PC, it draws power from the power supply to get all the work done, and while doing so, it produces heat. A lot of which is concentrated in the processor of your computer.
This is where the CPU cooler comes into play. It plays the role of constantly dissipating heat coming out of the CPU, hence keeping your computer safe. You will not have a functioning PC without this cooling system.
Because of its role, it is important to keep a close look at its performance and function to ensure it is working normally.
That is what this article will be targeting i.e, to provide you insight on how to check if the CPU cooler is working.
Besides visually examining the cooler’s fan, there are other ways to check and monitor the functioning of the CPU cooler which will be discussed in this article.
How Does the CPU Cooler Work?
There is a lot going on inside the CPU cooler. To put it all simply, the cooler is attached to the heat source very closely from where it draws all the heat.
The accumulated heat is transferred to the fan and the fan expels the heat either inside or outside the casing. Hence, keeping the heat away from all the important components.
From the casing, the heat is pushed out with the help of air cooling fans installed in the casing. This ensures the normal functioning of the CPU even for a longer period of time.
How to Check if CPU Cooler is Working
There are several ways to check and see if the CPU cooler is connected and working optimally or not. This article will discuss each separately as follows:
Observing Visually
You can check to see if the CPU cooler is running or not by opening the casing’s cover and looking at the big fan in the central part of your motherboard that is where the processor lies and the fan is situated above the processor.
This method is not very accurate but if you observe that the fan is spinning while your PC is turned on, it will at least tell you if the cooler is connected properly to the motherboard or not.
With that out of the way, you can look more closely if the cooler is running optimally as it is supposed to by following the below-mentioned steps.
Accessing The Motherboard’s BIOS
As you can get from the functioning of the cooler, you can see that the fan is one of the main components of the cooler.
So, one way to see if the cooler is working fine is to check if the fan is spinning optimally or not.
You can check that by accessing your motherboard’s BIOS, you can do it by pressing a specified combination (search for your specific motherboard’s keys on the web) of keys at the starting page when you turn on your computer.
From there, you can actually see the fan’s speed in RPM (Rotations Per Minute) and compare it with the company’s issued fan’s speed. This will tell you if the cooler is running at optimal speed or not.
Through Third-Party Applications
For the CPU cooler to work perfectly, it should maintain the processor’s temperature within normal limits. This is the most accurate and perfect way to judge if the CPU cooler is working as it’s supposed to.
There are several applications available such as CPU-Z, and HWINFO that provide not only monitoring services for your computer’s sensors like voltages and fan speeds will also show you the temperatures of different components in your computer.
The best part is that these tools are free to download and incredibly easy to use and don’t require you to be tech-savvy in order to use them.
Compare those values to the average temperature values for your processor and you will instantly know if the CPU cooler is keeping the temperature values within the normal range or not.
You also have to take into account that the processor gives different values of temperatures for being idle and being under the workload, so make sure you measure both while keeping an out for your background processes.
Conclusion
The CPU cooler being one of the most important parts of the PC makes it very important that its working should be closely and regularly monitored.
In case you avoid it and the cooler is not working fine, it will not take long for your processor to get overheated and eventually stop working.
This concludes my guide on “How to check if CPU cooler is working”. I hope this article gave you all the necessary information you lacked and needed to tackle this situation.
Q. How to check if the CPU fan is working?
Ans. You can check to see if the CPU fan is working or not by accessing the motherboard’s bias or downloading a relevant application and looking at its RPM values. If the CPU fan is giving “0” values then it is not connected properly and is not working.
Q. How to check if a liquid cooler is working?
Ans. You can check that by downloading a CPU monitoring app or accessing your motherboard’s bios and observing the RPM values for “Pump”. If you are getting “0” for the pump then your cooler is not connected to the motherboard properly and hence, is not working.
