Ok, so the last part of my system upgrades just showed up. I just received my AC Freezer 7 Pro and Asus P5K-E board. This goes with my q6600 I got last week.

I'm hoping for a minimum of 3.0 but would LOVE to get more. It's been a while since I have tried overclocking so this is going to take some reading/trial and error. I'll post updates.

BTW, I recommend the Antec Gamer 900 case. My e6400 dropped 5-6 degrees (idle) and my 8800gt dropped 11-13(idle) degrees by just changing the case. That thing (plus the 2 120mm vantec stealth fans) was worth every penny. Now hopefully the q6600 + AC Freezer, it will be even lower (at stock).

Nice & funny you mention that case as I just picked one up yesterday. looks like a good case for idling fans in for sure.

Ok, so I haven't gotten to the overclocking yet (not a lot of time available with a little one), but the good news is I at least have Vista installed. I checked the temps (idle) on all four cores, the highest was 23 and lowest was 19.

I think I have some headroom.

Check for BIOS updates, some boards read the temps of the Q6600 about 15ºC low.

There's also a new program called realtemp out there which a lot of folks swear by. It'll show a Q6600 as 5C lower than coretemp. (That's not why folks swear by it... ).

Nice, only took ya 3 days to install Vista! If only everyone had a smooth install like you did

It actually only took me about an hour to install vista. The problem was finding the time to work on it.

Ok, so I finally took a stab at it last night.

I'm stable at 3.0Ghz with 1333FSB. Not bad so far. No change in temps at all.