Im sorry but i need help again. I know im going to get made fun of for asking, but i suck with computers. What is a heatsink, im guessing its like a fan. second what is overclocking, is it just puting in extra fans, and third whats so great about soo many fans

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ah, I see they have the internet on computers now
-Homer

A heatsink is a metal thing that is used to transfer heat away from something hot. Primarily it's used on the cpu. The cpu gets really hot, so a heatsink is put on to help keep it cool. Unfortunatly, that is not enough. One also need to move the air for better cooling. So a fan is placed on the heatsink usually blowing air onto it. To make it work even better fans are placed on the computer case to create airflow. One fan usually blows air in and another fan sucks air out. Hot air rises, so you want the intake lower in the case and the outtake higher up. Fans and heatsinks, alone, cannot cause the temperature to drop below room temperature.

Common materials of heatsinks are copper and aluminum. Copper generally cools better. There is a thermal equation to tell specifically how it performs but I forget where to find it. The size of the heatsink, the number of fins, spacing of the fins, and shape all cause the heatsink to perform differently. Also other means can be used to cool the heatsink such as water or liquid nitrogen, often considered exotic.

You can find some pictures here.

Adding fans will not overclock your system, but it might help your overclocking success.

ok thankyou that answers a lot, but its says that fans and heatsink alone will not cool my system? what will then

also if fans and heat sinks wont make it overclocked, what will?

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ah, I see they have the internet on computers now
-Homer

Fans and heatsinks will cool your system perfectly. If you were not overclocking, you could probably get by with only the heatsink and heatsink fan. I was just saying that they will never cool below room temperature because they are passive cooling. I guess that is just stating the unneccessary.

Overclocking will most likely void your waranty and possibly may damage your various computer components.

So to overclock. That would be running your cpu at a faster speed. For example if you have a 1000Mhz cpu and you run it at 1050Mhz, you overclocking it. The clock just increased by 50, hence overclocking. However when this happens, the cpu usually runs hottor. Therefore extra precautions must be made to cool it, such as a better heatsink, faster heatsink fan, and/or intake and outtake fans. The more it's overclocked, the hottor it gets and the more cooling you need.

There are 2 basic methods to overclocking: increasing the front side bus and changing the multiplier. For changing the fsb, all you do is increase the fsb, usually in 1Mhz or other small increments. The other way, changing the multiplier, is simply changing the multiplier. For example the 1000Mhz cpu in the exaple is running at a 100Mhz fsb and at a 10.0 multiplier. If you increase the multiplier to 10.5 but leave the bus the same, it will be running at 1050Mhz. If you leave the multiplier the same and change the fsb to 107Mhz, you have 1070Mhz. Sometimes when changing the multiplier you need to change the voltege to a higher voltege. To do overclocking, however, you will have to either change setting via jumpers or the bios. If you can do it in the bios, things are much easier. You're going to have to look at your motherboard manual to see how to change these settings.

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Road Runner!!!!

thanks so thats what all this multiplier stuff is about with kits to change it

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ah, I see they have the internet on computers now
-Homer

I have not heard of a kit for this. If you were to overclock an AMD chip you would probably need to bridge the L-something bridges. I forget which ones they are. If you will be doing this I'll dig up the links on how to do this. You can bassically use a pencil for this. Maybe the kit sells a conductive pen with instruction and a hand stedier.

All the multiplier setting should be found in your manual, though. In fact, most of the settings for the motherboard should be explained in pretty good detail in the manual.