About a year ago I built my current rig from a wish list I had been compiling at Newegg, trying various combinations of components that would lend me the biggest bang for not so many bucks.
I picked out a Gigabyte Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128451
and an AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition Heka 2.8 GHz 3 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 95W Triple-Core Processor HDZ720WFK3DGI - OEM
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103652
The MB has a dual Bios set-up which allowed me to flash one with an updated Bios that could unlock the Overclocking features of the MB and the 4th core of the CPU, essentially giving me this processor:
AMD Phenom II X4 925 Deneb 2.8GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Processor HDX925WFGMBOX
Together with 2Gb of Ram G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F3-10600CL8D-2GBHK
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231134
which I have already increased to 4Gb total, together with Case, Power supply, GT9800/512 and an X-fi Sound card was a pretty cheap build; somewhere in the neighborhood of $700

I've been running this rig straight up with the unlocked Quad and no Overclocking save for a little experimentation with the AMD Overclocking Utility to see what the Auto Tune would do but this is not a permanent condition and even Windows does not recognize the change so I never really did anything with it beyond that. Looking at what CPU upgrades are out there I came to the conclusion that it really wouldn't do me any good to buy a bigger processor. The one I have was only $110 and the Quad (AMD Phenom II X4 925 Deneb 2.8GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Processor HDX925WFGMBOX) is now $124 and one more above that is AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core Processor HDZ955FBGMBOX is $139 and I think there is a 3.5GHz as well
So to get to the point of all this I had often wondered whether or not to Upgrade or Overclock. I started just going to Google and looking up my MB and CPU and Overclocking and found generally favorable results that were'nt too hard to duplicate, using the AMD OCU as a Guide I let it go through it's Auto-Tune function and noted the settings and just duplicated them in the Bios and Viola! I now have a AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz and it has been running just fine without any problems the only thing I can't verify is temps but since I have a really huge CPU fan and Heatsink I'm thinking it probably isn't enough to really be a problem going from 2.8 to 3.2
Since this is my first attempt at an Overclock I'd be interested to hear of anyone elses experience and suggestions.

Yeah good idea to OC but NEVER OC without knowing your cpu temps. Very easy to to fry the CPU. Easy way to find out temps is to google and download Core Temp. I have it running in the background all the time as I have an OC'd i7 and need to know the temps when running certain games etc..

Also check out the max temp for your CPU and make sure you dont get near them!!

Happy OC'ing!!

Rich

the problem is once you unlock cores on a AMD Chip that has cores disabled you lose the internal temp Circuit on the CPU, you have manually place a Temperature probe on the chip or use a mainboard sensor if your mainboard has one.

I had this program once before and it doesn't give me anything, all the temps are zero.

Ah SZ didn't realise that. Think I have only ever OC'd Black Edition AMD's before! In that case try and get a temp probe on the chip as SZ suggests, failing that be very careful!

Actually I had my first minor glitch, playing Call Of Duty BlackOps, the game and explorer and Steam all crashed with some small graphical texture corruptions on icons and taskbar so I backed it off one step to 3114 MHz and played it again with no hitches. Of course CoD/BO has had crashes and glitches since day one so this is not exactly an indicator of anything. I can't be sure that there is anything to gain through this experiment, 3Dmark06 only gave slight improvement I think my score went from 11238 to 11475 so performance is only a slight increase.

Around 3.2GHz with 2 cores is all one needs for the majority of newer games -- so your 3.1 and 4 cores is good. The next step would be a faster graphics card.

One issue with OC your CPU further. Its stock cooler is not strong enough to go a lot higher with security. Personally, I think getting an X3 2.8 up to X4 3.2 is "well done" I have tried unlocking 3 X2 CPUs and got an X4, X3, and X2 -- running at stock frequencies.

One can get an HD5870 for near $200 depending on the day. I got one for $202 and weeks later one for $205. Today, the cheap one is $210 -- best bang for buck in your case vs a new CPU or more expensive CPU cooler.

XFX HD5870 $210

I've got this cooling fan on it http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835185096R
and a huge 2500cfm Fan on the case blowing over it as well and one at the back drawing air out so I have plenty of ventilation. Not much of an ATI guy I have to say, so if I were to go for a bigger Vid Card it will be Nvidia, however since I cant run SLI in this MB and we're seeing many Vid cards with huge amounts of onboard RAM which I'm not sure can really be utilised on the 128-256 bit cards that seem to be the norm I don't know yet what that would be before going for another upgrade, that ASUS board that will take a AM3 chip that was featured in another thread looks promising but like I said I'm not really keen on ATI Radeon Cards, and it seems like since AMD and ATI are merged that it may be hard to find the right matchup on a Motherboard for AMD /Nvidia setups.

The cooler is cool enough So, its just a matter of what you can get out of your particular CPU.

I personally buy 256 bit cards. They can use 2GB of graphics RAM. Thing is, with a display at 1920x1200 or less, over 1GB is not needed (except for high AA levels -- i almost always use 0AA by preference -- so, 1GB for me is OK). Over 1GB may help for Eyefinity, but I use Eyefinity and don't see a problem with 1GB.

As an AMD/ATI fan, I can understand others are Nvidia fans. Still, Eyefinity is such a hugely effective upgrade, one might consider ATI simply for that reason. That is, one may want the option to try it out someday. Nvidia can do 3 monitors -- merely a driver fix put in to compete with ATI. However, it requires 2 cards in SLI with GTX4xx -- maybe one the newer GTX5xx cards will do it alone.

I have my phenom 11 clocked @3.9 gig stable, it will go to 4 gig but throws up errors during game play, I have found that adding extra voltage is the biggest cause of heating so have kept the increase low.Max temp is 42 C after 30 mins of gameplay.I don't need to alter the northbridge voltages.

Freq 201
multiplier 19.5
cpu over voltage .50 mv

not enough voltage can cause the same problem.

Yeah without being able to monitor temps I decided that when I got errors at 3.2 to back it off to 3.1 and it was probably a voltage issue I only bumped it about .025v since I have no expertise in this and don't really want to have to buy a new cpu.