Applying thermal paste to a CPU before dropping a heat sink on it isn't too much of a pain in the butt, but you have to do it carefully; as pretty much everybody reading this site probably knows, air bubbles and uneven application can affect cooling performance. What if you didn't have to worry about applying thermal paste? Crazy talk, I know, but during last week's Techno-Frontier convention in Tokyo, Sony Chemical & Information Device Corp was showing off a thermal sheet that it said has the same thermal conductivity of traditional paste.
If you're building a silent PC, nothing beats a passively cooled GPU. Ditching all those spinning fans works wonders for noise levels! Unfortunately, most passively cooled video cards tend to be less-powerful models; with great power comes greater thermals, after all. Colorful, a Chinese graphics card maker, is bucking that trend and working hard to bring a fanless GTX 680 to the market.
Running a silent PC isn't possible if you've got a rig that generates a lot of heat -- at least, it isn't possible today. The cooling specialists at Noctua have announced that they've teamed up with a company called RotoSub to create the world's first fan with Active Noise Cancellation, and they plan on showing off a working prototype of a Noctua NF-F12 running the tech at Computex next week.
The world's population of fan controllers grew by two this week, courtesy of BitFenix, including one model the company claims is the world's first Internet-connected fan controller (Recon) and another that sports low profile sliders (Hydra Pro) for compatibility with just about any case, even ones with doors. The Hydra Pro features 30W per channel performance (with five channels), offers push-button LED on/off functionality when combined with BitFenix's Spectre and Spectre Pro LED fans, and boasts BitFenix's SofTouch surface treatment similar to what you find on many rubberized smartphones.
Intel stepped up to the plate and seemingly 
It's a fact of life: all of the manufacturer graphics cards are built using the same core GPUs from Nvidia and AMD, so for a card to stand out, it needs to bring a little something special to the table. Some manufacturers go for sky-high overclocks; others go for unique cooling systems. MSI offers both with the newly announced GTX 680 Twin Frozr III OC.
We're starting to see some unique twists on Nvidia's recently launched GeForce GTX 680 graphics card, including a model from Gainward that's been outfitted with the company's new Phantom II cooler. 
Intel's Ultrabook initiative might have been met with early skepticism, some of which still remains, but by and large, the light and powerful form factor is proving popular. It's also creating demand for small size components that can be squeezed into a pancake thin frame. As time goes on, expect to see Ultrabook models start to adopt 4mm micro fans that were originally developed for the handset market.
It hasn't even been a full month since we ran our massive 
PowerColor has proven to be quite the tease these past few weeks by leaking pictures of custom cooled AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series graphics cards, including one with a waterblock. More recently, PowerColor posed a dual-fan Radeon HD 7970 videocard for a single-shot photo shoot, which apparently served as a short precursor to its official debut.
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