CPU Motherboard question

775 is pretty hard to find good chips for these days. Move to an LGA1155 board or an AM3+ board and look at getting a new CPU. Are you on DDR3, or was 775 still running DDR2? If you are getting new ram also, spent $80 and pick up 16GB. 8GB is barely scraping by these days.

I have the same board on my Dell desktop. I just upgraded the core 2 Duo E6320 (1.8 ghz) to a Q6600 Quad 2.4 (Overclocked to 2.6 ghz) that I bought on ebay for $65.
That along with a Radeon 7750 has taken Battlefield 3 from Unplayable even at low settings, to Playing Flawless on High settings.

I just got a very similar setup: 3570K, 2x4GB G.Skill Ripjaws @1600, Biostar TZ77B, AMD HD7870, and the Hyper 212. I was able to get my 3570K up to 4.3Ghz pretty comfortably. Temps and voltages are stable after a week. I could tweak more and push it further, but it would take a lot more tinkering with not much more juice. Most folks seem to hover around 4.3-4.5Ghz with these chips. I wasn't able to OC my GPU very far (1150Mhz), but I was also more reticent to push it since I don't feel comfortable cranking up the voltages without more cooling going on.

In any event, I figure I won't have to do much more than upgrade the GPU in a year or two. I purposely chose a more modest GPU knowing that I would replace it down the line and be able to "leapfrog" up a couple of steps more affordably. Yours may get another six months than mine.

Cooler seems fine. Not too loud. I get more noise from my case's intake fan. Relatively easy to install. Seems a no-brainer for the price.

My CPU is generally in the 1.2-1.3 range for voltage and doesn't get any hotter than 60C according to HWMonitor and idles right around 30C. I tried knocking the voltage down, but it didn't like it. I figure as long as temps are okay, it should be fine. OC-ing took some fiddling, but it will depend on your motherboard and BIOS options. As long as you take things slowly and deliberately, and you find the right guides and software tools, all should be well. If you haven't done it before, the basic concept for overclocking is to eke out more speed while keeping voltage as low as possible (in order to keep temps low). Be ready to reset your BIOS using the jumpers on your motherboard. A lot of trial and error and testing.

The big difference between the 2500K and the 3570K is that the old 2500 seemed to take whatever you threw at it. The 3570K seems a bit finickier. But just be patient. As I said, I gave up at around 4.3Ghz. I could squeeze more I'm sure, but it was getting a lot harder to find stable settings at 4.4/4.5. And these things also depend on other things too (your PSU, your case temps, your heatsink contact, the idiosyncrasies of your CPU, etc). Since I got reliable and safe results from 4.3, I just left it there. All told, it took maybe 3-4 hours of troubleshooting/testing/tweaking.
Edited by confidenceman - 12/10/12 at 11:16am