With overclocking boards these days, the plethora of voltage adjustments available make destroying your hardware a very real possibility if you are slack about cooling. AMD boards from Epox for example, allow you to increase the Vcore on an AMD CPU to an insane 2.2V. With anything short of super cooling, chip meltdown due to electron migration can become a very real possibility. The only realistic way of letting you use very high voltages is to use serious cooling. Water-cooling is all well and good, and at a given thermal load will dissipate heat away from the CPU more effectively than even the best heatsinks. However in order to really be able to safely use highly overclocked systems, Below Ambient cooling really is a must. Enthusiasts have been using Peltier Devices (a guide of which can be found here) to get extremely low temperatures for quite a few years now, but modern CPUs output so much more heat, the technology really has reached its limit as a useful overclocking tool. Back in the days of the FCPGA Pentium III, an 80W peltier was more than enough to get temperatures well below zero degrees. With the advent of the Athlon, such a low powered device barely provided tangible gains over water-cooling. Higher and higher power peltiers are now available, but given that to be effective, the peltier must be of a rating around 1.5x the thermal output of the CPU to be effective, the combined dissipation of the peltier's hot side means that you need SERIOUS cooling to dissipate heat from the peltier (we are talking a watercooler with at least 2 radiators here!). What I am trying to say in a very round-about manner is that in order to get extreme cooling from a modern PC, (a Pentium 4 running at just 2GHz outputs over 90W) you really do need a professional super cooling unit.
There are several options available. First up, is the original VapoChill from Asetek. This unit has been around for well over a year now, and we were able to borrow such a unit from Chillblast for a while which allowed us to test some motherboards such as the PX845G from Albatron to unheard of heights. (how does 3.1Ghz from a P4 1.6a sound?) However with a fully volted P4 2.8Ghz running at the 3.x range, the original vapochill starts to struggle. Don't get me wrong, your temperatures will still be excellent, but the actual internal chip temperature might hit 30 degrees C under load. The main competitor is a super cooler from a company called Chip-Con; the Prometia. To be frank it is a hideous unit, looking like a full-tower IBM case from the 1985. However its cooling prowess could not be sniffed at, and it had a considerably more powerful compressor than the original Vapochill. This new unit - the Vapochill Premium Edition redresses the balance!
As you can see Asetek have sent me the stylish Titanium edition, although it also comes in white if you would rather use existing beige drives.
