So after two months of waiting I finally OC'ed, the results are...

i7-3770k @4.508Mhz

So I finally broke down and decided to do an actual OC as opposed to using OC Genie II on my MSi Mpower. The Genie set me up with a nice safe 4.222Mhz running at a voltage of 1.213v. Earlier this evening I decided to really see how my air cooling setup works and if its legs stretched as far a I'd have hoped. So far my expectations have been meet. Now bear in mind this is my first real overclock so throw pointers out if I'm doing something stupid.

I started out with an Evo 212 since it is basically the old standby for cpu heatsinks (or so it has been explained to me) The case I have is the Azza Genesis 9000, the reason I got this case, apart from all the wonderful room, was due to its reversible motherboard tray. Now the picture I'm putting here is just with the push fan on the heatsink, I added the pull before I went for the full overclock.



The two 120's at the bottom bring cool air up into the heatsink, which obviously push/pulls it and cools the cpu. Which then pushes the air almost directly into the blower of the 660 Ti.

As of right now I'm running Prime and have been for 4 and a half hours, I had a temp spike about an hour ago where the #1 and #2 cores temps shot up to 86C which almost made me stop the test, however it has only happened once. So far my temps have balanced at around 73-76C at a 4.508Mhz OC with a voltage of 1.241v.

This, to me at least, appears to be a good overclock. At least in terms of temp wise after a few hours. Now how much might my temps improve if I went with a higher end heatsink or high pressure fans instead of a couple stock Corsair models? Also might toning it down be safe? This is the first time I've really pushed it so I'm not quite used to seeing higher temps. I understand an 86C spike is probably not good so should I think of dropping the stock frequency a bit perhaps? Opinions are appreciated.