Should I overclock my AMD Phenom II x4 965 black edition, and how much?

[Crestfallen_12]

I have an AMD Phenom II x4 965 black edition 3.4 hz, an motherboard asus m5a88-m, and a cooler corsair 500w, and a GPU HD7850
I had recently overclocked my CPU to 3.6 hz, I wanted some extra fps, and i'm having very bad fps at games like dark souls 3. While I was playing CS GO, my pc just turned off. When I restarted it, there was a really loud noise, after going back to 3.4 hz my pc went to normal. What happened? I don't know much about overclocking, My motherboard/cooler couldn't handle it? Maybe I overclocked it the wrong way? Should I try to overclock again, or just stop?

 

[CountMike]

It's lousy VRM on that MB that's stopping you and possibly CPU cooler if you don't have a good aftermarket one. It took my 965Be a Gigabyte ga-890fxa-UD5 and Mugen3 Cooler to keep it at 4.2GHz. Gigabyte GA 790 xt-USB3 burned VRMs when I tried same thing.

 

[TokyoTom]

Please make sure you have adequate cooling as CountMike suggests. Do you have an aftermarket CPU cooler? If not, you shouldn't even consider anything above a very mild overclock.

I used to have a x4 955, and overclocking it was helpful to get another year or so out of the CPU. I used a Xigmatec cooler that was similar to the Hyper 212. You can get a cheap Hyper 212, and that will do a good job.

Check out guides at Overclock.net or here in the Tom's forums before proceeding.
http://www.overclock.net/t/525113/phenom-ii-overclocking-guide

The 965 is getting a little old so you are not going to see massive performance increases, but an OC will help a bit.

If you don't want to mess with changing the cooler, which is a pain in the ass, you may just want to OC your graphics card a bit to squeeze out a few more frames.