Heat is the main restriction when it comes to building the perfect rig, well that and money. There are many products out there to help combat heat but none of them do it better than water cooling setups.

Here are a few signs of overheating:

• Crashing during intensive game play.
• Drop in Frames Per Second (FPS).
• Burning smell.
• Components failing.

To check your tempurature you can use a program like SpeedFan.

Air cooling is a possible solution to cooling your PC but it has its limitations. You can only have a certain number of fans in your case and the more fans you add the louder it gets. Try falling asleep with a tornado under your desk. You can use wire management and tuck wires out of the way to create better airflow but the change in temperature isn’t that dramatic. Another limitation to air cooling is just the space you have in your case, cramming a large CPU cooler between to your RAM with heatsinks and massive graphics card can be quite difficult to do and sometimes downright impossible. Watercooling is a very viable solution to cases with space constraints.

Benefits of water cooling:

• Uses less space. Most watercooling units simply have a radiator, reservoir, and the slim heatsinks themselves.
• Much quieter. Watercooling units typically use only a single 120mm fan which creates much less noise.
• Moves heat better. Think of a car, water is used to cool the engine, why because water can retain heat longer than air thus bringing the hot water from the CPU to the radiator where it is cooled and sent back to the CPU. This process brings all the heat created by your CPU and forces it outside of the case unlike fans that swirl the hot air around inside your tower.
• Allows for overclocking. When you overclock your processor you pump more voltage to it creating more heat. Better cooling allows for more voltage and more stability.
• Plus it looks cool:

Tweet