Upgrade help, where to start?

Looking to dump a little bit of money into the machine I built a couple of years ago. Handing this one down to my wife in preparation for a new build. I overclocked the processor from day one out of the box and have never had a problem @ 3.2. I love that thing...

It's been a while since I looked at any hardware items that would fit this build. Figured I would turn to the guys that got me started in the first place.

Where is the best place to start for the best upgrade? With today's games is there an obvious bottleneck?

EVGA 780i
Q6600 Oc'd to 3.2Ghz
OCZ Reaper HPC Edition 4GB (2 x 2GB)
OCZ GameXstream 700w
EVGA 8800gts 512 (G92)
Zallman 900 all in an Antec 900

If I had to pick one thing I would say your video card is the bottleneck. I think if you invested in some better cpu cooling you could squeeze a bit more out of your cpu as well. If you can get your cpu to ~3.6+ and throw a GTX 460 in there you'll be killing pretty much any new game out there.

Do you remember off the top of your head what the "safe" working temps are for the Q6600. Was 70c the danger zone?

I'll poke around in the CPU forum as well, probably find it there.

Thanks

According to this its 60c, but I seem to recall a lot of people claiming the max safe temp for intel cpu's being anywhere from 70c - 100c.

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Core_2/Intel-Core 2 Quad Q6600 HH80562PH0568M (BX80562Q6600).html

Hmm, yea I was thinking 70-80.

Aye, just found this straight from Intel: http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=29765

The newer version G0, which I have, is according to them safe to 71.

I initially was worried about this thing lasting a year or two OC'd ... at this point I think I'll try to crank some more out of it and it if blows ... it will be upgrade #1 lol. Looks like I could get a decent replacement for this and the graphics card for ~450.00 which is fine.

The q6600 has thermal overload protection, it will slow down, then shut off as temps climb. Your video card is the most obvious bottle neck. try downloading a registry cleaner and run that too. Also uninstall any unnecessary toolbars or various other crapware on your system that slows it down.

for your wife? does she game? If not, i'd get an ssd for quick app load times.