New gaming rig, overclock and benchmark questions

julienboiz

Honorable
Jun 27, 2013
13
0
10,510
Hello guys !

Yesterday I built my first gaming PC (quite an adventure) and I installed Windows 8 on it this morning.

The parts are the following : i7 950 with a Noctua NH-L12 CPU fan, msi gtx 670, gigabyte GA X58A UD3R, 6gb Corsair ddr3 RAM, 120gb samsung 840 SSD and a cooler master 650W PSU.

My question(s) is/are the following:

What's an efficient and fast way to make sure my PC performs as well as it should be ?

Could you give me a link to an easy tutorial on how to overclock my CPU ? I think my i7 950 might be bottlenecking my gtx 670, not entirely sure though.... I've seen a lot of tutorials online and they never seem clear enough in my opinion.
I don't want to overclock heavily, just to about 3.8 or 4.0 (can the Noctua Mh L12 even go that far ?).