How did you get on? Pics? What exact board is it please the long name as I think I might have the same or similar board.
Bottomline is it's not worth getting a £80 CPU cooler for overclocking the Q9550...if he want to stick with what he got, some decent £30~£50 air cooler will do the job.
Going to a i3 21xx is bad advice - stock for stock theres barely anything in it and you just spend money and put effort into reinstalling, etc. to see very marginal gains at best in the real world you probably won't actually notice the difference (even in games its generally ~5% difference) - if your going to change out the motherboard, RAM and CPU do it proper and go for a generation leap in performance.
wouldnt the £80 cooler be useable on the new system when he finally upgrades?
If he's only upgrading up to 1155 platform. There's no guarantess that Intel won't do something stupid make a different mount for that next platform.yea it would... its compatitble with 775, 1366, 1155 and Amd platforms
Then your case's cooling/airflow must be not as great as can be. Back then on my Q6600 at 3.6GHz on 1.5v, the cheap sub £20 Arctic Freezer 7 Pro could keep its temp not beyond 70C even in prime, despite open air/average casing bench of better and more expensive cooler on the same CPU same settings has higher temp results.Except that it wouldn't, temps on a £50 air cooler would not differ at all from my Q9550, I would need to move into the £60+ range and decided I wanted to try something a bit different.