recent bonus, looking to upgrade!

[Deleted]

And also just to be able to say "I have a 1.2KG CPU Cooler. So what?" - clearly a horrible reason to buy a big cooler (dark rock in my case), but hey!

Shroudster, weren't you planning on doing the OC this weekend?

@OP: Performance gain when overclocking is... awesome. /me points at his sig.

i had it planned for the weekend but well, something gone very wrong with my package.
it's been all over the country but still no delivery.....

as for the OP , everyone here has his own definition of running hot. (however if you are just going with a minor overclock i doubt you'll run into the issue)

[chazus]

everyone here has his own definition of running hot.

Gaming on my stock cooler at 3.8ghz and 50c idle and 60c load was warm, but fine.
Gaming on my aftermarket at 4.2ghz and 35c idle and 45c load is cool
Stress Testing my aftermarket at 4.8ghz and 80c is hot, BUT it was also stable. So I consider that 'acceptable' for stress test purposes. I didn't bother checking temps while gaming, since I was doing it purely to see what I could get out of my system for benchmark/test purposes. I have a cheaper board (MSI Z77A-G41) which doesn't allow quite as much flexibility for OC, however for most people I think 4.2-4.4 to be the 'normal overclock range'.

[Confined]

I live in Vegas. It's 70 degrees F year round. Hooray for air conditioning. >.<

It gets up to 49c ambient here (120F) for a decent part of the year, sometimes. It's almost mandatory to keep the AC cranked or you just melt.

Yup pretty much the same here :P. Sucks really, WTB Weather switch with Europe for a year or two PST.

[Aratreis]

I've always wanted to run SLI now that I think about it, would that be feasible? I'll have a budget of upwards of 1200 when all is said and done, so i figure i'd just build the best I can while using what I have as best I can, you know?

[Killora]

I've always wanted to run SLI now that I think about it, would that be feasible? I'll have a budget of upwards of 1200 when all is said and done, so i figure i'd just build the best I can while using what I have as best I can, you know?

You have 8gb Ram, right?

Also, SLI is overkill for single 1080p monitors imo. a single 670/7970/680 can run games at ultra settings pretty flawlessly. i think Crysis 3 is one of the only exceptions.

[Aratreis]

I have 4gb of ram.

overkill, eh? Guess there's no need then xD