Originally Posted by Lasereth

If you fried 2 or 3 processors then you shouldn't be OC'ing in the first place. It's actually sorta hard to fry a processor by overclocking. Every motherboard made in the past few years has thermal detection onboard that turn off the PC if the heat threshhold is exceeded. If you're upping the voltage by such a large amount that it fried the processor then I'd consider different options.

Do what I'm doing when I upgrade next: buy a good processor so you won't have to OC. OC'ing causes instability in many cases. OC'ing is also about 75% luck and 25% skill. Sometimes you simply get parts that refuse to OC with any amount of stability. Buying a processor that's good enough to game with without OC'ing is much cheaper than frying 2 or 3 processors.

On top of that, processor speed means NOTHING compared to how important your videocard and RAM are concerning gaming. If you want a fast processor, that's one thing...but do you know why? Games would much rather have a faster videocard and more RAM than a fast processor. Benchmarks today are still reporting that a processor from the Athlon XP days will run a game just as fast as an Athlon 64 if you have a nice videocard and a nice amount of RAM.

Overclocking is just not worth it unless you have a system specially ordered from a site that guarantees OC'ing performance. Otherwise it's just a luckfest while you cross your fingers hoping the FSB will go up without getting a bluescreen. If I were you, I'd forget water cooling or OC'ing in general and just buy a $150 processor that will run games as fast as a $750 processor combined with the right videocard and RAM.

-Lasereth