mikukuma wrote...
Is there a type of air fan I should look for then? I did watch the videos, but I did not get a lot of the detail into what I should be looking for, and I'm not sure what kind of activities would really overclock my CPU (or GPU, I'm not 100% which).
99.99% of users have basically no use for overclocking the CPU. It's great if you're doing professional image/video work and you want to shave some time off your renders or something but the average person who wants to play games or lighter professional workloads it's not going to make or break your build. If you do want to overclock, you'll probably need a better motherboard and a high end cooler.
Most air coolers on the market will do a fine job for mainstream CPUs. There are only a few things to worry about for coolers.
1. Size: Some coolers are huge. I mentioned this in my previous post but large coolers will sometimes get in the way of your RAM, especially if your RAM has a big heat spreader (the fat plastic that covers up the circuits). Unfortunately I think it's fairly difficult to predict whether or not your heat sink will get in the way. However if this does become a problem, you can sometimes get away with moving the fan to a "pull" configuration (so the fan is sucking air through your heatsink, rather than blowing into it). Some people will tell you that pull configurations are bad and that just isn't true. The numbers say that pull is very, very slightly worse than push
[source].
2. Performance: Just look up some benchmarks, find out how well the cooler you want performs in real world testing. The Hyper 212 EVO is one of the most popular fans on the market. You can use its benchmarks as a baseline for comparisons if you like.
[review]
3. Price: It should obviously fit your budget.
Some other things to consider:
The ambient temperature in your room is ultimately going to be one of the biggest factors in how well your cooler works. It is physically impossible to cool your CPU below ambient temperature. That's a limit dictated by hard science. The only way you can possibly cool below ambient temperature is if you're using an alternative setup like phase change or liquid nitrogen. If you live in a hot climate and have no air conditioning, don't expect to get amazing results no matter what cooler you have.
If you overclock you will void your warranty. I've never had to use my warranty but if you value it, don't overclock.