Welcome to another Nerfwire Build Guide! In this series, we’re giving gamers hot tips on how to get the most out of their PCs. This week, we’re focusing on overclocking, and how to keep those temps down while you do it. If you’ve got a CPU, GPU, or PSU that’s capable of being overclocked, the biggest problem you’re going to run into is keeping temperatures low and stable against the increased voltage. Nerfwire recommends liquid cooling if you’re going to overclock—and the most cost-effective way of doing this is to just build your PC in the fucking sink.
Nerfwire recommends placing the PSU directly under the faucet, as we find that this is the component that gets hottest first in our sink-mounted builds. Make sure that the motherboard will be fully fucking submerged once the water is running, and that any small pieces of food don’t get lodged into your CPU fan, as this can have an adverse effect on the RGB lights on your cooler.
We generally recommend that you get all of your components nice and wet before moving on to the next steps of assembling and slotting your hardware. Make sure to get those suds right in your fucking RAM slots if possible, and really take that Brillo pad to the top of your CPU—we don’t need thermal compound where we’re going!
Next steps, as usual, are to socket everything necessary on your motherboard and wire everything to the PSU. Turn the faucet on, boot the system, and it’s time to start the overclocking process! If you’ve got a motherboard that features overclocking, it’s best that you follow your specific hardware’s instructions. However, if you’re going to be doing your overclocking in the OS, look out for artifacting or display failure on your GPU, and keep an eye on the height of the electrical fire coming from the PSU.
A couple of tips and tricks for beginners. It’s important to make sure that the water temperature is turned to the “cold” setting, and that any food processor under your sink is running at all times for maximum drainage. As always, join us next week for our RGB guide, where we’ll walk you through the steps of just launching your PC into the fucking sun.
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