[QUOTE="cmdrmonkey45"]Just get a 1GB GTX 460 and call it a day. Your CPU has very little impact on gaming unless it's either really low-end (eg Celeron, Atom) or horribly antiquated (Pentium 4, Pentium D), and yours is fine. Also, 4GB of ram is plenty for today's games, and you can't upgrade to DDR3 because your motherboard doesn't support it. I had a setup very similar to yours (Core 2 Duo E6600, 4GB DDR2, 975X mobo, 8800GTS), and the 1GB GTX460 gave me the boost in performance in recent games that I wanted. I can now max every game except Metro 2033 at 1680x1050, and even Metro I'm running on really high settings. Don't overclock. It's a waste of time on modern CPUs, and just makes your computer hot and unstable for no particularly good reason. Leave the overclocking to the n00bs and little kids. hartsickdiscipl
Who's the noob?
You might want to look up some CPU benchmarks for some modern games before saying that it has very little impact. Your info is a bit out of date. Why would you post something like that after I (a former E8400 owner) posted my personal experience with overclocking that exact CPU? I saw big gains in performance in several of my games, and that was 2 years ago. I was using an 8800GTS 512, which has roughly the same horsepower as his 8800GTX. Granted, his biggest performance gain in most games will come from a new GPU, but don't call people who overclock noobs. It sounds like you may have had a bad experience with overclocking. Don't assume that other people might not have a better grip on it than you.
Overclocking made sense back in the 90s when CPUs were extremely expensive, slow, and did most of the work in games, and even a modest gain through overclocking could make a huge difference in your framerate. Now with CPU architecture mattering far more than raw clock speed, and most of the work in games being done by the GPU, it's just a gigantic waste of time to overclock, and it makes your CPU unstable and hot and shortens its lifespan for no particularly good reason. If your CPU is too slow, buy a new CPU. I'm not the one with out of date information. You are. OP, don't overclock, especially if you have no idea what you're doing. Considering you weren't even sure what kind of RAM your board takes, I doubt you'll know how to reset a CMOS jumper when something invariably goes wrong.
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