I plan to get a Phenom II 955 and overclock it to 965 speeds. Doing so should make up for the overhead caused by the southbridge chipset raid I will put on the 2 60GB SSD's coming in for that system. Past that, I intend for this system to last 5 years like my current one has and thus don't see the point in risking stability or longevity of the system.
Seeing that this is an old thread, I'll respond to the one who revived it -- usually the motherboard you purchase for overclocking comes with some sort of overclocking software. Additionally, there's the old fashioned method of doing it manually in the BIOS. You'd be surprised how much more you learn by doing it that way, but just be sure to do it in small steps. There are also other ways to overclock, such as upping the voltage and clock rate of the RAM, or decreasing the CAS latency of the RAM. Check out
www.tomshardware.com (OC section) in order to get started.