Today I will be reviewing one of the most cooled items in the entire case, besides the processor. That would be the video card. At first no video cards had fans or heatsinks on them. Then they started to get faster and hotter which required them to have a heatsink. Now some manufacturers are even including a heatsink/fan combo on the video card. As you can tell from above the video card is one of the hottest parts of the system. If it is not cooled properly there is a good chance that it will die out, even when its not being overclocked.

This has lead many cooling companies to produce video card coolers for 2 main reasons. People want a longer lasting better cooled video card, and overclockability. The latter reason is the much bigger one though. The video card is one of the easiest parts of the system to overclock. There are tons of programs out there that let you overclock it on the fly.

Overclocking your video card seems to have become a computer pastime. The reason the video card is the easiest part of the system to overclock is because it doesn’t affect anything else when you overclock it. It can’t hurt anything else either. When you overclock your processor, you overclock the FSB, which in turn, overclock the PCI and AGP Bus, and the Hard Drive. When you overclock the processor there are a lot of factors besides the processor in determining whether or not it will work. In the video card there is only three, which all pertain to the card itself. How much heat it produces, how well its cooled, and the video card’s limits. What I mean by the last one is that every video card is different. You can have a super-cooled video card that won’t overclock and one with just a factory heatsink that overclocks like crazy. I will now do the best to explain what I mean.

Let's take 2 runners for example and think of them like 2 video cards. They both can run 10mph in 100F weather, but only one can (overclock)go 15mph. No matter how much cooler the weather is the other runner can’t brake 10mph. Every video card is like this. Some naturally can go much higher than the specified speed while other will have a tough time breaking anything. This has to do with yields with is a big complicated process which I tried to simplify with my runner analogy. If you have a better one email me and I will post it.

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