Heat build up is the main enemy of overclocking.
This was my answer to potential over heating when overclocking. It occurred to me that heat rises, so therefore the best place for an extraction fan was above the hottest spot. Some quick work with a drill and some self tapping screws and I'd knocked nearly 8 degC off my processor temperature.... Cool.
My original fan wore out, so I took the fan that came with my new Athlon processor (bigger better heat sink and fan having been fitted) and enlarged the hole in the case smartening the whole job up in the process (There are now cases on the market with fans already fitted in the top I see).
Next problem was overheating on a typically hot running TNT (1) graphics chip. A old processor fan clipped across the PCI cards soon sorted that, and was better than trying to fit one in-between the cards.
Yes that is a length of toilet roll drawing cooler air from lower holes in the case. Iv notice you can now get ducting on the web for this purpose and that dell are fitting it in their machines. We've all got toilet rolls so it's got to be the cheapest upgrade around and it works.
Dust build up over time in the cooling fins of the processor is another major problem. It acts like a wooly jumper keeping things nice and warm.
I decided to try and remove some of the dust going to the processor. A friend found some filtration material from work, and I built this into some ducting which also directed the (hopefully now clean) air at the processor. This all works nicely and now I just have to remove and hoover out the filter occasionally with hardly any dust appearing in the cooling fins, and the temp remaining low.
The cover on the front is a recent addition, allowing me to just remove it for hoovering as supposed to having to take the side of and remove the ducting every time.
I have seen so many machines that have succumbed to heat with their cooling fins totally covered in dust after years of service I was not surprised to see recently that filtration is starting to be fitted (great minds think alike).
If it gets clogged it can make things worse. So remember to hover it out regularly. I have a coal fire, which makes thing worse. Its surprising how much dust collects in the filter every couple of months.
I ran a Celeron 366 at 488Mhz (88 fsb on Abit BE6-2) continuously (24/7) for many years in the above setup with no heat problems at all. I now have a Athlon 1900+ on a Shuttle AK35GT2R in there. After it's had some time to burn in I shall see how it handles the heat of overclocking.
All ribbon cables were cut to length (not recommended with ATA66 cables as min length needed for signal stability) and neatly folded (that's why their flat) out the way down the side of the drives and out the way of the air circulation.
Round cables aren't a great advantage and can slow your system down if your trying to take advantage of ATA66 and above. If you simply round up a ribbon cable or a bunch of single wires, you bring the wires into close proximity to one another and increase the chance of cross talk and errors in data.
ATA66 cabling works by having 40 extra wires providing a grounded screen between each signal wire (hence no more connections to board/drive needed) stopping cross talk and reducing the error correction needed and so can use a higher data rate. If each signal wire in a rounded cable isn't individually screened the errors and corrections will slow the data transfer down.
This page updated.. 14/03/03