New to overclocking

Hey everyone!

I just took the plunge and upgrade my hardware to something I thought would be a 'Beast' of a machine.

Been out of touch with upgrading computers since 2002 so I have a few questions.

This is my current set up:

Motherboard: asrock z77 extreme6
CPU: I5 3570k
GPU: MSI Geforce TI 660
Ram: Kingston 8 GB
SSD: OCZ Vertex 3
Windows 7 - 64bit
Cpu fan - Hyper 212 Coolermaster

I'm reading everywhere online that people are able to overclock the i5 to 4.5 ghz and from what it seems like, I'm no where near that. According to the bios, it's set at 4.2. (Anything higher and programs start to crash along with bsod) and cpu-z says I'm at 3.4 ghz.

Really confused here. My old cpu was an amd fx 6100 and I thought this would be a killer upgrade. On benchmarks and games, I hardly see a jump in performance. I'm also getting a lot of screen tearing in games ( never had vsync on before and now I'm forced to turn it on)

Any advice would be great!

Thanks

-A

Did you stress test your overclock with Prime?

Those screen shots do not show anything. They are at idle. We need to see voltages and temps under stress.

Also check out this thread, and see if the settings in it are of any help to you...

http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=711935