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Overclocking your system is going to cause your components to produce more heat as what you are doing is increasing the voltage and conditions at which they run at. Considering that digital circuits significantly slow down and wire resistance increases as the temperature goes up, you’ll need to have a way to keep the insides of your system nice and cool. Unless you’re just doing slight overclocking, you’ll need a bit more help than what came stock with your components.

Fans

You can easily increase the airflow throughout your system by purchasing additional fans for it. Many cases have extra slots for additional user added fans or you can easily modify your case so that you can insert more fans. As the fan does require a powersupply, you will need to make sure you have enough connections on your motherboard to properly power your additional fans.

Heatsink

This method of cooling is most often found on a CPU or GPU as they disperse heat through contact with the component. Although heatsinks come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes they are all made from aluminum or copper. Heat is dispersed through the heatsink through conduction, convection, and radiation on it’s own, and can be used to create a forced air system in conjunction with a fan. Using a heatsink won’t cool down your entire system, just the specific component it’s attached to. You will also need heat paste to properly apply the heatsink to the component.

Water Cooling

With water having a higher overall heat capacity, density, and thermal conductivity, using a water cooling to reduce the heat in that your overclocked CPU, GPU, and RAM is producing is a very efficient method. You also would have the advantage of a quieter system as water cooling units only use on fan. You can purchase a do it yourself water cooling kit if you are just starting out, or you can actually make one yourself.

These are the three most common methods of cooling an overclocked system. While there are plenty of other methods such as liquid nitrogen cooling, you will rarely need more cooling than these options can provide for you. More advanced cooling is often used for benchmark testing when pushing an overclocked component further than most would.

You will also find that these three methods are listed in the from cheapest and easiest to most expensive and more detailed to set up. This doesn’t mean that new users should default to stuffing their cases with fans, but it does mean you will want to fully understand the installation process before you jump right into it.

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Make sure to check out our other posts on Overclocking Software and Video Card Overclocking

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