Can I overclock with stock fan to test performance first?

[avadakedabra]

I have a mid size case with Asus motherboard and AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black that I'd like to overclock. Last night I played around with it for fun but didn't get great results. The motherboard has a 5% and 7% preset overclock which I tried which gave a bit more performance.
When I tied doing it manually though setting voltage, etc based on some guides online, I actually found I got WORSE performance than the standard settings. I didn't play too much since my mobo doesn't let me tweak from windows so it was a constant back and forth reboot. some of the settings people had luck with online don't work for me, it just says overclocking failed and won't boot.

I was going to get a Corsair watercooler fan for the unit tonight but am just wondering if the issues I'm having are due to the cooling, or just wrong settings. Like even when I set it at 3.8Ghz with 1.4v etc, it shows my CPU temperature around 40 degrees. I don't find it ever really increases a lot by what I've done.

I'm just wondering if I can overclock it and get the performance with the stock fan to evaluate if it's worth spending $100 on a water cool system, or if the reason I'm getting bad performance now is due to the cooling? Thanks!!!

 

[grahamie]

i would toss the stock cooling on it if you can you will have more head room for overclocking
i used to have a similar chip and it clocked to 4.0 on a good liquid cooler i would not recommend a kit but if its in your budget its better than the stock cooler