Throughout the day I get quite a few emails asking me various tech & computer related questions, so I thought, “What better place to answer them than my blog?”

Q: What i have to do to overclock core i7 965 and what type of cooling to use and what memory, which motherboard and a good videocard.

A: Overclocking the Core i7 as I covered somewhat in my video here, is not all that complicated provided you have the right system components, but what I didn’t really cover is a list of recommended components.

I’ll start with cooling and work my way through the rest of your questions. When we did up that video, the CPU had just launched and there wasn’t a whole lot available! In fact, we only had ONE CPU cooler in stock that was even compatible with the Core i7! Now the situation looks a lot better and there are lots of different options.

Water cooling recommendation: The Swiftech APOGEE GTZ gets my vote. Don’t forget a hold down!
Air cooling recommendation: The Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme still rocks and comes in 1366 now.

For memory, once you get into about 1333MHz triple channel, the performance doesn’t improve much. The most important thing to consider when selecting memory (in my opinion) is the after-sales support. Almost every RAM vendor it seems offfers a “lifetime” warranty, but very few of them are actually likely to be around long enough for that to matter. At this point I can’t recommend buying 3GB of memory. It’s time to move on to 64-bit and lots of RAM!

6GB RAM Recommendation: Corsair 1333MHz C9

For motherboard there are lots of different options out there already, but my high end recommendation is still the Gigabyte EX58-EXTREME. It has a great feature set, the BIOS is maturing very fast (I use this board in my own system), and the overclocking is very good, even with 12GB of memory.

If you want to save a few bucks, the recently-launched ASUS P6T looks like a tremendous value offering (if you can call a $300 board a “value offering”…)

As for the video card, that doesn’t affect overclocking, but now that so many of the X58 boards support SLI AND Crossfire, you’re free to use pretty much whatever video card you want! Just pick the one that best suits your budget and performance requirements.