CPU cooling is a cottage industry. Too many companies to mention make water, air, and electronic coolers. Case cooling, however, is just as important. Air coolers for CPUs and GPUs need cool air to blow into their heat sinks. As they do their job, the hot air from the heat sink gets dissipated right into the confines of the case. Without an air cooling system that both draws cool air from the outside in and exhausts warm air out, your computer’s air-cooled chips, and those without cooling, aren’t being cooled as efficiently as possible.
Cooling isn’t limited to the CPU, GPU, and southbridge. Other components that don’t necessarily require their own dedicated cooling hardware can benefit from fresh air billowing through the case. Hard drives tend to run hot enough that you can actually buy specialized air coolers for them. Various chips, like those of the northbridge, the sound card, the network device, and so on, generate heat—not enough to fry themselves, but heat nevertheless—and should be subject to a bit of a cool breeze.
You can’t rely on the fans in the power supply. The ATX standard and its derivatives are ambiguous as to how power supply fans may be used. Some PSU’s have two, some have one; they might draw air inward and vent their warm air right toward the CPU, or they might vent outward. PSU fans conform only to the whims of the engineers who design the devices, and their goal is to cool their own components, not the whole PC.
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