There are many ways to keep your system cool. A lot of it depends on your air flow, CPU, motherboard, and GPU. I always recommend having good case air flow and like to see a minimum of 3 case fans (one in the front pulling air in, one in the rear pushing air out and one on the side pulling air in right on top of the GPU and motherboard. Other fans can be added - you wan the front fans, bottom fans, and side fans pulling air into the case and top and rear fans pushing warm air out of the case).
Most good GPUs from companies like Sapphire, Asus or EVGA offer good custom cooling for their GPUs (often times having large heat sinks with up to three cooling fans) and therefore if you have good case air flow you rarely have to worry about them overheating. Depending upon what "tier" motherboard you have you may or may not have heat sinks on critical components (ie motherboards like Asus's Sabertooth have military grade components and heat sinks on everything so you rarely have to worry about the motherboard overheating). If you have a more budget oriented motherboard your going to want to have some additional air flow in your case so that critical components not protected by heat sinks stay cool. Last, but certainly not least is the processor. Intel processors overall stay cooler than AMD (FX) processors however a good aftermarket cooling solution is still advised. Most times an Intel system or AMD FX system will be good to go for moderate overclocks with something in the performance realms of the Hyper 212 EVO or H7. Of course if you want to push an overclock as far as possible your looking at top end air cooling (NH-D15) or water cooling (H100i GTX or better, or of course custom loop). To be totally honest air cooling is much easier and hassle free compared to water cooling. Any water cooled option available is going to have pumps that can fail, and of course you always have the ever present danger of a leak which could short out your entire system. With a good air cooler like the NH-D15 you have cooling nearly equal to the H100i with the safety of an air cooled heat sink where other than a fan dying there is nothing that can go wrong. I have been on a H100i GTX with my FX 8370 personal gaming rig, however as soon as I have the time and am done filling customer orders I'm going to be switching from the H100i to the NH-D15 (I also have 2 Delta 3400rpm fans that should give the NH-D15 a cooling boost above the H100i).
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