Your setup is fine and obviously can be easily overclocked. As of how far you can go, that would depend on the capability of your CPU and RAM (primarily).

To be honest, all CPU's these days would allow you to have a quick and easy overclock without having the need to increase any voltage or changing to a better HSF. The question is how far you would want to go. If assuming you want 4Ghz then obviously you will have to invest on a better cooler, better fans, etc. Don't worry about the motherboard, even a cheap H55 board can easily clock the i3 to 4.5Ghz Technology these days are a lot better.

There are so many types of voltages and it controls different things. If you totally have no idea what they are about, going through some beginner OC guides would certainly help Normally when you overclock your CPU speed, you are indirectly overclocking your RAM.

That's not very true. People would normally want their OS drive to be fast so everything is a lot snappier and it's for the same reason why people buy Raptor drives when SSD hasn't existed. If there is a cheap and good method to store the whole OS in RAM permanently without losing data when you power off, many people would be doing that as well. You're paying the money for the speed which SSD's can offer, not the space. A typical setup is to have the SSD storing your OS, programs, etc and all other things in a conventional 1TB drives as storage/backup.

If you have not tried a properly configured SSD system, it would be very difficult for you to understand how good/fast is the SSD. You need to understand that the current bottleneck in most modern computers are I/O devices, not your CPU, RAM or board. By having an SSD, you are actually closing the "bottleneck" gap. For example in my PC, I can start Office applications in 1 second, Photoshop 64 in 3-4 seconds, boots up Windows in less than 15 secs. Far Cry 2 game loading is also easily 50% faster compared to my previous Raptor RAID-0 setup.

Before that, what is the problem you are having?

First of all, we have to understand what each and every component does and how it impacts the overall performance of the PC. CPU's today are very powerful and unlike decades ago, CPU's are no longer the bottleneck. If you have a slower CPU, it only means you complete certain tasks slower. It wouldn't hurt if it takes extra 30 seconds to unzip a file (for example) It would only hurt if your PC hangs due to insufficient processing power but these days, chances of it happening is very minimal as technology is very advanced. If you're into compression, rendering, etc which uses a lot of CPU processing power then yes, it makes sense to invest on an expensive CPU. If you're a normal home user that mainly wants to enjoy some games, Internet, etc then invest on a higher end graphics card. A Q6600 with a GTX 295 will still beat an i7 870 with a GT240.

Good RAMs are to compliment high overclocks and if you don't overclock, forget about getting expensive RAM's. RAM's these days are also a lot better than the past and trust me, even those cheap Value RAM would get a 4Ghz OC easily except it runs on crappy CL9 timings. The latency matters a lot if you do benchmarks but in real life experiences, you don't really feel a lot of differences. You spend RM1500 for a Dominator GT RAM, you get a good overclock and tight timings, your 3Dmark scores or whatever benchmarks would show you have a Godlike rig and the numbers are a "WOW" factor to some people. However, the other guy running on Value RAM with an SSD boots up 5-10 seconds faster than you, his games load faster than yours and everything he clicks pops up instantly Hence, you decide which one is more practical and suitable for you. This is also to prove that conventional platter drives are somewhat the bottleneck of a fast system.

I'm not saying it doesn't make sense to invest on expensive high end hardwares. Enthusiasts like me do it for the hobby and passion. We enjoy overclocking and exploring new hardwares so yes, we will spend money on all these Dominator GT RAM's, expensive CPU's, motherboards and stuffs because that's what we enjoy doing. However if you're talking about practicality then that's another story. Hence, ask yourself whether you're doing it for the fun or practicality. Come to think of it, my home PC is even more powerful than some servers in the office Last but not least, all my remarks are purely based on my real life experiences, not from reading reviews so rest assured that these are genuine experiences. It's obviously fun but at the same time, we burn a lot of cash

This post has been edited by clawhammer: Feb 25 2010, 04:09 PM

Well done azrys and happy overclocking E8400 E0's can easily do 4Ghz.

The main difference between SSD and conventional hard disk is the "random access time". Conventional hard disk has platters and it needs to spin so that data can be retrieved while SSD are in flash memory hence everything is a lot faster. The Samsung F3 is another platter based hard disk so even if you hook 4 units up in RAID-0, the SSD would still be faster in terms of "random access" and this would mean everything literally pops up a lot faster when you click on them In my own personal comparison, a single SSD non-RAID beat my 2 x 74GB Raptor ADFD in RAID-0 by a fair margin