The Importance of Proper Cooling in a Gaming PC

Over the past couple weeks, I've barely played any games at all. I got back into F.E.A.R. and have almost finished it, but my system has not being running so hot lately - actually, it's been running very hot, which brings me to the topic of this post. Over the past year I've replaced just about every piece of hardware. I started with the motherboard and worked my way out. Most recently replacing my 266MHz memory with a pair of 512MB, 400MHz Corsair XMS ProSeries RAM. Since my CPU has a front side bus of 800MHz, I was looking forward to a pretty significant performance increase. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case at all. After installing the RAM, I noticed no increase at all. Still the same hiccups and lags remained. It was time to do some serious troubleshooting - having dropped so much cash on my machine over the past year, I wasn't ready to give up on it just yet. I knew there had to be a cause for the slowdowns and poor performance I'm seeing.