Should I try to overclock with my spec?

Stock cooling - not much.

3rd party cooling - go further.

It depends on whether you need to or not. ie Gaming.

IMO, I would leave it alone... the fact that you ask if you should, suggests that you probably haven't had much experience in over clocking... Your first experience should be done on a machine that you can afford to lose, as it is very easy to brick your computer if you dont know what you are doing... overclockers.com is a good site for beginners ..

I'm jealous of you guys for knowing this knowledge... long way to go until I can OC >.<

EDIT: I downloaded NVIDIA System Tools with ESA Support and it seems I can use it to OC

Microhard said:

I'm jealous of you guys for knowing this knowledge... long way to go until I can OC >.<

Just keep in mind that none of us were born with Overclocking knowledge - we all had to start somewhere

That and a lot of reading plus plenty of trial and error testing...

Personally, the most important thing to do first is to research what the 'max safe volts and temps' are for your CPU, RAM and NorthBridge.

Particularly with stock cooling.

Knowing what not to exceed can avoid permanently damaging something.

dood said:

Personally..I dont put much faith in gui tools for overclocking.
First..they tend to use alot of 'auto' settings. And this can lead to over voltage to the CPU.
It may work fine for a 'mild' overclock..but I certainly would NEVER use it to go 'wild'.

Ditto.

The BIOS is always the best way to OC.

The only time you should really resort to GUI tools are for locked BIOS'es.

Microhard said:

EDIT: I downloaded NVIDIA System Tools with ESA Support and it seems I can use it to OC

Do not, I repeat, do not use OS based software to overclock; especially if this is your first foray into overclocking.

Read, read, read. Read until you know every insignificant minor detail about each piece of hardware in the machine. Once you've done this, you won't need to ask, you'll already know about what to expect in terms of clocking, what you'll need to achieve it, and, most importantly, you'll have the knowledge to go about it the right way: in the bios.

The E8400 is a very nice chip. I just recently retired one to the htpc. For the most part you can expect to get ~ 3.6-3.8GHz on stock voltage (given the right cpu), and 4-4.2GHz with a minor bump. I can't tell you what "minor" means for your chip, but, as I said earlier, that's something you're going to find out when you do things right.

Some cores, like the E8400, really do not like being overvolted... and they generally perform worse when they are, which is just another reason to avoid software based OC tools.