Originally posted by: S7EXEN
Would it be easy enough for me to OC if I made good selections on parts so that it would make up for buying better cooling devices? Never OC'd before... don't really know anything about it. I'm your common gamer. I just want to play Crysis and UT3 without any lag or stuttering and with nice resolution.
To answer your original question (if OC is good/worthwhile for you), then it's completly up to you to say. If all you're doing on your pc is surf the internet and use office applications etc. then the answer is most likely no. But if you use your system for tasks which are heavier, such as video editing, encoding, gaming, precise math calculations (need to be careful with that and OC) etc. then OC will probably benefit you anywhere from little to alot.
As for OC'ing (theoretically) you can't expect to get the best OC out of your system without having any knowledge no matter how good your hardware is (and yes, hardware does matter, a lot.).
You have to do some reading, and keep asking questions in forums like this.
You might want to consider however, the fact that some motherboard manufacturers ship their motherboards with utilities that allow you to OC safely without the need to have any prior knowledge. I know Gigabyte has a killer app. for that (EasyTune), also MSI has a program called dual core center, though many people reported problems with that app.
Couple that with apps. like RivaTuner or ATI tool, and you can manage a vary decent OC for "free". However in most cases it'll still not be as good as you could've get for diving into the BIOS yourself.
Bottom line, start doing some more reading. Good luck!
Edit: not to mock or anything, but you're definitely NOT a
common gamer.