Want to Overclock my Q6600 from 2.4GHz to 3.0 on ASUS P5QL Pro

[mistro]

This will be my first time attempting this. I heard that the Q6600 can be overclocked easily. I had this system since NOV. 2008 and just stuck to stock speed but I would like to get a little more out of it.

My motherboard is ASUS P5QL Pro
Memory: 4Gigs DDR2 (2 sticks)
BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. Version 0410. I hope I do not have to update the BIOS. Everything seems fine and I looked at the release notes of the updates and they address things I'm not worried about.....unless I missed something.)
OS: XP SP3 (upgrading to dual boot with Windows 7 in near future)
GPU: EVGA NVIDIA GTX 760 2Gb ACX

I was going to take my machine to a shop to get this done but I would like to find out if this is something I can handle myself as a beginner. I read many posts with different opinions but I would like to know about doing it on this specific system (P5QL Pro/Core Quad Q6600) I also read some reports that replacing the stock cooling system may not be necessary. I'm not going for 3.5+ GHz, just would be happy at 3GHz. What are the most important things to consider to overclock the CPU in my case?

 

[Davil]

You're always going to want to get a better cooler if you are overclocking. You can get a decent one for around $40 and it's definitely worth it. It is something you can do on your own very easily. I will say that that is a pretty old CPU though so you might just want to upgrade it. You could do an upgrade pretty cheaply for about $300 to an i5-3570k which you'd probably be much happier with. There's already a lot of guides on the forums on how to overclock processors so I will link to one of those below also.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/gwmM
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/259899-29-core-overclocking-guide

 

[mistro]

Thanks for the info Davil.
I'm saving that money for the new rig I will be building this summer. For now, all I want is to finally overclock this CPU. I'm looking for anyone who knows about the particular motherboard I have. I see different results for different hardware and would like to narrow things down to my system. Besides, even if I bought a newer CPU, wouldn't I still have to deal with tweaking settings in BIOS?

 

[CRITICALThinker]

If you have the stock heat sink, you may have troubles with heat, more cores = more heat output. Check this thread that I recently helped someone with for some helpful links: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2069110/intel-core-duo-e4600-ing-completely-loss.html#xtor=EPR-8809