Total newb needs help with e8500 on a P5Q-e Motherboard

Hey guys, thanks for any and all help you guys can give me here, I'm into gaming but I bought a computer about 2 years ago and was looking to upgrade when I realized I've never even OC'd my old computer, thought I may get another year or so out of it so I can see greater improvement in the performance of multicore processors vs the dual core I have.

That being said, I've heard of people hitting 4.5 stable on this combo, wouldn't need to push mine that hard, but I'd love to hit as much as I can stable to give me the ability to stretch the performance of that 3.16 GHz I have right now.

I am running:

Intel E8500 Wolfdale @3.16
Asus P5Q-e motherboard
8 gigs (2gig x 4) of 4-4-4-12 GSkill 240 Pin DDR2 SDRAM 800(PC2 6400) (I think, will double check when I get home)
EVEGA GTX460 (Fermi) Superclocked 1GB 256bit (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130571)
On a 600 watt Powersupply

I know my 7200 RPM Western Digital HDD is part of my slow down, but with the price of SSD being insanely high right now I'm trying to wait it out til they come down a bit. If you guys need any more info from me please let me know.

Anything you can do to hold this newbie's hand through the process of overclocking would be greatly appreciated!

-A

First of all, (unless I misunderstood) hard drive speed does not affect overclocking and CPU speed.

This should be your first stop.
Core2 Overclocking Guide
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/foru [...] king-guide

Next stop should be a guide for your particular motherboard. Google is your friend.

Go through the guides. Then take your core voltage off Auto and set your memory voltage to factory recommended values. Change the System Memory Multiplier (or whatever your BIOS calls it) from AUTO to 2.00 - whatever you need to set the memory clock to twice the FSB. Then when you increase the FSB, the memory clock will rise in in proportion with it. At an FSB of 333 MHz, your memory clock should be at 667 MHz.

Download CPU-Z to check your FSB:RAM ratio. It should be a 1:1 ratio. Overclocking RAM faster than that really does not help performance and can increase instability:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/251715-29-ratio-myth

You will need better than stock cooling.

Do not exceed 1.45 volts core voltage or 70 C load temps.

Thanks guys, I am going to be ordering a new cooling heatsink/fan soon, was hoping to get some guidance here about that as well, since I know I'm going to need to be displacing a lot of hot air. The stock stuff is garbage for sure, thanks for the links, I will look forward to getting into all of that. I know the mobo's FSB is way faster than what my RAM will allow, but right now it's set to 333, instead of 400, which will be the first change I make, that will bump me up to the rating for my RAM at least.

I wasn't saying that the HDD was slowing down my CPU, I just meant in terms of overall performance.

Okay, sounds good, from reading so far, I think the max I could hit with my 800 PC6400 ram would be 3.8 GHz, I'd like to get into the 4k club, but we'll see.

Thanks! Could someone also tell me what the best cooling setup would be for 100 or less?