Thinking of upgrading PC. Advice on what to upgrade?

[katanaso]

So I finally replaced the thermal paste (it was completely shot as suspected) and the CPU's now running at 50-55 (Peaking at 60) while I'm playing Planetside 2. Once I get the Noctua fan I'm sure that'll come down some more, but I'm quite happy with a 40 degree drop .  

Going to start looking into overclocking now. How do I go about overclocking the i5 2500-K? How high can I push it without breaking anything?

Glad to hear that it was the paste.

OCing is simple, but it depends on your setup.

Search Google for "overclock i5 2500k msi p67a-c43" and you'll find a plethora of results.

https://www.google.com/search?q=MSI+MS-7673+P67A-C43#q=overclock%20i5%202500k%20msi%20p67a-c43

FWIW, I've been running my i5-2500k at 4GHz since April, 2012.  On air, it only hits 55C, regardless of playing AH2 or working in Photoshop or Lightroom.

So, 3.8GHz to 4GHz shouldn't be difficult for you, and relatively safe as far as OCing goes.

[SilverZ06]

Here is my OC on my i5-2500k. Cooled with an H80 on low setting:


I have run this setup for the last several years without any issues what so ever.

[Latrobe]

Thanks for all the advice everyone! Got my new vid card today and my new fan. Good lord they are nice! CPU is barely peaking over 40 degrees, GPU is at 40-50, playing games on max settings at 60FPS! Got my CPU slightly overclocked at 3.8 now. Going to be increasing that slowly as I mess with some other settings to get everything just the way I like.


Hope you all have a Merry Christmas as well! 

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Thanks for all the advice everyone! Got my new vid card today and my new fan. Good lord they are nice! CPU is barely peaking over 40 degrees, GPU is at 40-50, playing games on max settings at 60FPS! Got my CPU slightly overclocked at 3.8 now. Going to be increasing that slowly as I mess with some other settings to get everything just the way I like.


Hope you all have a Merry Christmas as well! 

Glad to hear you had success! If you already get 60 fps steady performance, stop the overclock there. If you go higher there will be a stage sooner or later where you start to get problems and as long as you have that 60hz cap you're not going to see any visible improvement.

So smartest is to avoid the problems alltogether and push the machine higher when you possibly get a 144hz screen (if it's necessary even then).