1st time OCer - AMD Athlon II X3

[AmericanFear]

Here's my current rig:
ASUS M4A79XTD EVO AM3 AMD 790X ATX AMD Motherboard
GIGABYTE GV-R577SO-1GD Radeon HD 5770 1GB
AMD Athlon II X3 440 Rana 3.0GHz Socket AM3 95W Triple-Core
RAIDMAX HYBRID 2 RX-630SS 630W power supply
(i'll need to double check my ram as i'm at work and don't have that information handy)

One of the first things I did was unlock the CPU and my computer is currently reading it as a phenom II; Performance on this has been great, however it's a couple years old now and performance is starting to suffer. In a couple days I should recieve my shipment of a SSD and an upgraded CPU heatsink. After i move windows to the SSD and reformat everything I would really like to begin overclocking. One reason I went with the athlon over the phenom is I had read that the athlon with overclocking would be at least comparabale to a stock phenom (of the time).
That being said, I have almost no idea what I'm doing when it comes to overclocking. I am very proffecient with most things computers but I have 0 experience when it comes to OCing.
What types of things should I be careful of? What sort of warnings/recommendations would you give based on my mobo/cpu and my lack of experience?
I'm sure i'll have lots more questions once I actually dive in but any preliminary advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

[DanceswithUnix]

Hi and welcome to the forum.

First thing to note is that your unlock of the cpu is an excellent start, but has already bumped up the power requirements by activating parts of the chip that were idle. Keep an eye on the temperatures when overclocking as it is no longer a 95W cpu.

Otherwise, these things are a bit hit and miss so take it gently and a step at a time. You already have quite a fast cpu, so you may well only get another 10% out of it. Some people seem to get 4GHz out of their setups, I never got my 955BE past 3.4GHz and found it wasn't worth the extra heat and fan noise so back on 3.2GHz now.

What is it you are finding slow? It might be the graphics card is what is really holding you back if you are gaming.

[wasabi]

I wait and see how you get on with the SSD before messing with overclocking. SSD was the single biggest speed bump I'd noticed for years.

[Plot3000]

Just saying that psu isnt that reliable.. it has dual 12 v rails and no 80plus so it might not be that good for overclocking ..

[AmericanFear]

thanks for the replies;
A quick update:
My roommate has alot more experience with this than I and after a few minutes of tweaking he managed to bump it up to 3.45GHz and its been running stable.