BattleField Crash

It's two things: your cpu just meets the minimum requirements, and right now EA back end servers are having serious issues.

You could try clocking up your core, but to be honest, I had an E8400 that couldn't even give me smooth play at 3.6GHz-4GHz. Of course, what's good and smooth is entirely subjective, so you may view things much differently with an OC? Bad performance is the result of DICE's last patch, R7, which brough a 20% drop in fps for about 60% of the people. There's another patch that due out; however, it was supposed to be out ~ 5 weeks ago, and nobody will say for certain whether or not it addresses the performance issue. That they don't say they address it doesn't bode well.

The EA backend issue is anyone's guess when they'll figure it out? Every Tuesday they do maintenance, and every Wednesday something seems to be worse.

Nobody can say with 100% certainty how an unreleased game will run on your rig; however, we can make good guesses. Since Treyarch is doing Black Ops, I'd say that if you can run CoD: World at War good, then you'll be able to run Black Ops good... but you can't hold me to that.

I do not recommend overclocking software, at all, ever. I think if you're going to do it, then you should do it properly, which is manually in the bios. The last thing you want is to have overclock software pump a ton of voltage into the core when you don't need it. There's a guide stickied in the overclocking forums here; you could, and should, start reading there.

If the lag is due to EA backend server problems, or if it's due to the server you're on not having been rebooted in a while, then no piece of hardware you buy can resolve that issue. Your only option is to try a different server. If you're running 64-bit, you have to run the game as Admin to be able to see pings. However, sometimes they don't display. My best advice would be to use the region filter to set your region.

As for improving performance, that's a tough call. Both cpu and video card are right at the minimum levels, and that was before R7 brought the 20% performance hit. If you're thinking beyond Bad Company, then perhaps a graphics card might be the way to go, but if you're focused on Bad Company, and future BF titles, then a quad core is probably the best first buy?

Bad Company, a console port, is poorly optimized, so at least for that game, you'd get the biggest performance increase by getting a quad core. If you can also afford a new gpu, that of course would be great too.

Here's a gpu performance chart, created pre-R7. Keep in mind these figures were created using a 3.7GHz i7, and while there's no chart for your resolution, you can still get a sense of where you card is going to place: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 GPU Performance In-depth > 1680x1050 – High/Medium/Low - TechSpot

Without knowing what cpu you have, I can't tell you what temps are safe. To know only that it's a Core2 isn't enough. However, for the most part I can say the entire line clocks very nicely.

It's not so much the heat you have to worry about, although it's a concern; it's volts that kill cpu's quickly. Without aftermarket cooling I suggest you stick to seeing how high you can go without adding voltage to the core... which is something I would advise against.

I don't know what you're using to watch temps, but Hardware Monitor is good, for temps on everything, plus it displays min, max and current, which is always good information to have: CPUID - System & hardware benchmark, monitoring, reporting