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Originally Posted by Blackeagle
knipex is right in saying that refrigeration is the way to go if max O/C is the only goal. But most who are going for a performance system also include a GPU block to improve cooling & O/C of the vid card, and very few can afford a refigeration set up for both the GPU & CPU. And a extreme water rig cooling both the CPU & GPU can come real close to a system in which the vid card is air cooled but with the CPU cooled by phase change for overall system performance, and the water rig will still be much lower cost if a frugal person builds it.
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A lad over at OCUK forums has an interesting thread categorising peak overclocks of various users. Of course the sample size is still "too small" to draw any strong conclusions, but there are the beginnings of a pattern:
http://server6.uploadit.org/files/weescott-OCUK.jpg
The original thread is
here.
Fairlt clear distinctions between the top-end air and top-end water, but phase-change doesn't pull
that much of a lead over top-end water, and unless given a particularly good CPU, phase-change isn't always getting ahead of water (except on P4's - although I suspect that if the IHS's were removed that the results would be a lot closer there too). Add in the costs of buying and running a phase-change setup and it is pretty apparant that it is truly a brute-force solution with fairly minimal gains.
Totally agree on the water-cooling CPU + GPU thing. The ability to water-cool the GPU as well and boost its overclock will typically play a much larger factor in the computer's perceived speed for gaming, than merely phase-change cooling the CPU and leaving the GPU air-cooled.
Phase-change's ability to super-cool hot CPU's cannot be doubted though, just the budget required to achieve such.
Arbitrarily sticking a GPU block in the test though seems rather odd. Fine if it's just for a "complete kit test". Not everyone water-cools their GPU.
[Edit: Fix quotage]