Cool your VRMs

James Prosser and Daniel Meyer show you how to prevent your motherboard from melting when you overvolt your system.

There was a time when overvolting your components was a nefarious practice only carried out by the overclocking elite, but now even amateur overclockers know that you need more power if you want a higher overclock. This voltage is regulated by your motherboard's VRMs (voltage regulator modules, also called MOSFETs), which ensure that the power supplied isn't too high or too low. However, while your VRMs will be quite happy with a CPU at stock speed, they'll become toasty when you start cranking up the volts for a big overclock, particularly if they're bare. This can make your machine unstable and limit your overclock, and could even result in a fried board.

If your motherboard doesn't have a heatsink on your VRMs then you can easily make your own. All you need is a spare heatsink, a Dremel and some thermal tape or adhesive. With our custom heatsink in place, the temperature of our VRMs dropped from 31.2°C to 4°C. All testing was carried out by overclocking a 2.66GHz Core 2 E6700 to 3.6GHz, using high vcore and PLL voltages, and then running Orthos for 20 minutes until the temperature stabilised. An XSPC temperature reader was used to record the temperatures.

Thanks to l3v1ck for coming up with the idea for this guide.