3. Cooling

     Cooling is an easy task for some but there are some aspects that are easily overlooked. Much like the fundamentals behind choosing a good power supply, cooling is of the same. Cooling will determine whether or not your system is stable and can remain that way. Silicon maintains its ability to function through the art of staying cool, hence why there are heatsinks on almost everything on a computer. Sometimes that's just not enough, and although recently motherboard manufacturers have adopted heatsinks to their chipsets, and both Intel and AMD have incorporated better heatsink-fan (HSF) designs to their retail processors there still remains the overclocking factor. At ClubOC and other sites around the net we like to call it tweaking. Tweaking is just that, tweaking every last little nook and cranny trying to get that extra edge out of your computer. Sometimes you can take this too far with such thing as submersing your computer in below ambient mineral oil, or LN2 cooling which is extremely dangerous. For now we'll mention how a good heatsink can give you that extra edge and what it takes to maintain that overclock on your system.

CPU Cooling


 The "Golden Orb". Cooling in the early days of overclocking.


Modern cooling with Swiftech.

     If you take a look at the designs above you kind of get the impression that a good heatsink for overclocking is a heatsink that has a large amount of surface area. This is true to an extent but I have seen some really cheap HSF's that are very poorly designed with two or three different kinds of metal and a poor mounting mechanism. On average expect to pay more than $20 online or $30 retail for a good heatsink. Every now and then you'll find a good HSF for cheap but its best to just face it and get something good, you won't regret it. Such companies like Thermalright are Swiftech guaranteed winners in the processor HSF category.

Motherboard Cooling


Good Chipset Cooling


Adequate Chipset Cooling

     The chipset is one of the more overlooked components of overclocking. The chipset handles the "meat" of data-transfer communication between the memory and the processor. When you overclock the FSB, the chipset gets hot, and in cases such as with Intel's 865 and 875 chipsets can literally melt a cooler off the board. Chipset cooling, or PROPER chipset cooling is essentially for the outmost in stability. Even the simple addition of a small fan to the Chipset can give you a big boost in overall FSB speed and stability. For those FSB tweakers out there the addition of a chipset cooler from either Thermalright or Swiftech will give you results you want and could give you an additional 50mhz.

Video Card Cooling

Poor Videocard Cooling

Almost Overkill, but not quite...

This is Overkill... Notice the frost from -100C temperatures...

     Overclocking your video card used to not be as important as it is now. It seems that more and more games are utilizing more features that are on a video card then overall processor speed. This is why you would treat your video card much like a processor when it comes to overclocking. The only problem is that there isn't very much out there in terms of cooling, although the cooling that comes from the manufacturer is a lot better than it would be with a processor manufacturer. There can still be room for improvement, but most of the improvement lies in voltage modifications that so far have killed more hardware in our lab then any other mod, so for now I suggest downloading something like Riva Tuner and overclocking your video card to roughly 5-7% of what it is at now. This will give you a noticeable gain in performance and not kill your video card. Such programs like Riva Tuner has a huge following, and an abundance of literature to get you going in the right direction, so please take advantage of Google and the "read me's" that come with it.