overclock or not to overclock??

[stiz]

i'm not sure what would be the best thing to do here so i thought i'd ask you lot

My current pc:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 @ 2.13Ghz
2 gig ram
nvidia 9800GT
300gb HD
Win XP XP3

not a bad system but its starting to strugle with the newer games.
Now i'm planning on buying a new system later this year if all goes well, however i would like a little boost to tied me over. I've looked into overclocking and come to the conclusion that i would need a better CPU cooler (useing stock at the mo and running 40*c ish idle). So is it better to buy a cooler and overclock or just make do till i can buy a new system??

BTW i'm not wanting to go down the mega complex overclocking route, simple is better for me, just bump up the GHz a little to make life a bit quicker

[kilo delta]

What motherboard are you running and what's the speed rating of the memory? Depending on the mobo you may be able to fit a Penryn quad core chip and 4GB of fast memory...HDD and GFX should be fine.

[stiz]

P6N SLI series MS-7350 (V1.x) motherbaord according to the manual

As for the memory, cant rember

[kilo delta]

That's an MSI board? I think that your most cost effective upgrade would be an Intel E8600 which is clocked at 3.33GHZ...fast enough to not require overclocking,but will hit 4.5GHZ on the right board and with a good cooler. I don't think your board will accept the 45nm quad chips, but this dual core is very capable.
Match the E8600 with 2x 2GB of 800mhz memory (the highest supported by your mobo,AFAIK) and you should see a nice increase in fps.

[harleyman]

YUP I have the E8600 OCed to 3.6 and it rocks on a Gigabyte MoBo X48 running PC 6400

[stiz]

thanks chaps, what brand of ram would you recomend?? or doesnt it really matter??

[harleyman]

OCZ Corsair Patriot


I would get PC8500 if you get an X48 mobo though..its one step faster..And pick one with the lowest CASS you can get 7 or 8

[stiz]

well bit the bullet and ordered, should be here next week

[stansdds]

Good deal, Stiz.

If you ever start overclocking, you'll likely never stop. I have found that with a good CPU, a decent overclock is the cheapest of all performance upgrades.