Help On Q8300 Overclock

I Know I Know.. there are plenty of items strung about either on google or on this forum about this processor and overclocking. im just seriously in need of an in depth help. i dont have much time to screw around with overclocking anymore with a kid on the way . 40+ hour job and a house to maintain to tweak around with hours of system checks and such .

so intern i would love some advice on the best optimal overclock for an intel q8300 chipset to get maximum performance without replacement parts.

i changed the the speed to 400x7.5 without any other tweaks for a 3.0ghz jump but i feel no improvement in fps/game lag so i feel i need to either up the anty on the ghz or im not working high enough voltage? or memory speed? im very inexperianced with overclocking im more of the love to learn but less keen on attention =D


keep in mind i only payed $100 dollars for this whole setup which is quite lucky in my opinion but anyway



Specs
Q8300 3.0ghz intel Quad Core
Evga 550 ti 2g
4g ddr3
2T Hd + 300 HD
liquid cooled cpu with 4 Enforcer 10m fans i believe size wise
Massive size case and a 750w Power Supply

Q8300, not going to get much past 3.2 without serious effort. Download GPU-Z and Real temp, enable logging at the same rate, compare the logs, its your 550 ti holding you back, the high cas latency on that ddr3 isn't helping. define game lag, like load times, which games, etc. etc.

Buy an 8GB kit for overall experience post boot improvement, then see what you can do about that 550 ti for the games, and put 410 in for the FSB, orthos test from there 3mhz at a time(20 minutes until up and up until it fails, take 2 steps back and ur done) You don't have to sit there with orthos. Don't expect past 3.2 with the Q8, its the Q9s that could do 3.6-3.8.
(if you mean stutter instead of lag, check your hard drive activity when it happens, look at the led light, if they coincide, get more ram so it can cache that data).

Congrats on the baby!

*if only 2 slots of ram are taken, and those sticks are identical match, find 2 more of those, the P45 can be a bit touchy so do not mismatch make and specs between channels.

Video card is probably holding you back as nicspits said. What games are you running? Some are more CPU dependent than others but all rely heavily on the video card.