to your new home lol.
I bought a x2 555 BE with the intention of unlocking and overclocking it. I got it to run as a quad, but unfortunately I couldn't keep it stable. It would run for as a quad for a few days and at some point I would get spontaneous reboots. It drove me nuts trying to troubleshoot it and finally I figured it out when I looked into event viewer. In the log file the errors were reported as "WHEA-logger, Event ID 19, Processor ID: 2 (the third core)". The errors were always linked to the third core and that's when I knew it was defective.
Crazy thing is I could overclock the hell out of it when it was a dual core, but if I tried to unlock and overclock on top of it...that was just double trouble for me.
I'm sure if I spent a lot more tedious time into researching the problem I might have found a workaround solution, but I got frustrated in trying to keep it stable as a quad so I went ahead and bought the x4 965 when I came across a really good deal on it.
Unlocking didn't work out too well for me, but don't let that discourage you from trying. Despite how this may seem I'm really not trying to rain on your parade. Some people can unlock and keep their duals as stable quads while others, such as myself, didn't get the luxury. I think my old 550 was one of the processors which was originally constructed as a quad, but it failed AMD's quality assurance testing so they disabled the back two cores and sold it as a dual core.
All in all unlocking is a crap shoot (as in playing a game of craps), just roll the dice and see what happens...just don't come out of this
expecting it to unlock and stay as a quad. Hopefully it will stay stable, but realistically you need to be prepared if it doesn't pan out as planned. I wish you the best of luck and hope it works out better for you than it did for me.
You're planning to unlock
and overclock? Unlocking in itself is going to raise temps a good bit because of the additional two cores and overclocking is going to bring in its own heat buildup. I really should take a minute to emphasize that you take the time to put time and research into finding a good cooling solution. For the love of God, please don't attempt any of this on the stock cooler.
I like Corsair, I've used their ram. Never tried any of their psu's (I'm an Antec user), but they're pretty good from what I hear.
If you have any concerns or doubts about power requirements then use this PSU calculator (found on Antec's site):
http://www.antec.outervision.com/
I like their PSU calculator because it takes into consideration not only your cpu, ram (number of sticks and type, and gpu, but optical drives, usb devices, and additional pci expansion cards as well. They even have a section for overclocking goals to factor in for your oc wattage. You should be good to go with that psu, but should you need a little reassurance then the calculator is there to help.
I don't know what 120mm fans you're planning on buying, but people underrate and underestimate the quality of their fans all the time. I recommend NMB-MAT Panaflos (harder to find now) or the Silverstone FM121. Anything Silverstone is good really.
I'm just rambling on aren't I? Damn, I must be bored.
Good luck and let us know how it works out for you.