I've been overclocking my CPU's since my first Cyrix P150. (remember those... 
) Last year I decided to upgrade to an AMD64 3000+ on a K8N Neo2 Plat. board after reading here on the forums about the great OC potential of this setup. I got the board and an 0433 winnie, a new case, an xp-90 cooler and splurged on an OCZ520 PS. Got it all set up and immediately had problems with my ram. Seemed the Corsair XMS 3200 memory wasn't happy in the board; it was fine at stock speeds, but if I pushed the HTT past 215 it wouldn't boot to windows, even if I had dividers set. Very strange. I figured out that one of the sticks was bad (2x512), but instead of buying another one I went with some nice TCCD ram, 2x512 Patriot XBL. That sucked because ram was so expensive last year... Anyway I get the ram and go to work. I manage to get to 2475 but not 1 Mhz more, and it wasn't completely stable either. The most I could get stable was about 2.2. My temps were good, and voltage increases didn't help. I was a little dissapointed in the oc, but the chip and platform are great so overall I was content.
I ran with that for a few months and all of a sudden games would lock up once in a while and stability became an issue. At this point I just went back to stock speeds and decided maybe I just had a flakey board, as I had read some stories about some problems with the MSI boards. Or perhaps the chip was just not a good oc'er.... I didn't care, I didn't have the time or money to figure it out...
Recently I've felt the need for more speed with the newer games that have been released, so I try to crank up the winnie again. It aint happening. It doesn't want to do anything but stock, but now I'm determined. I do a little research, and being a bit strapped for cash I decide to try a 3000+ Venice; these puppies seem to do a bit better, and what are my chanced of getting another dud? All my other chips besides the winnie were great oc'ers, so I find a nice deal on an e3 chip, a week 36. Of course right after I buy it I see an e3 3200+ for about 15 bucks more..... :| Oh well, too late. I get this thing in the mail Wednsday and get to it. This time I'm going to be a little more systematic in my approach and try to nail down the problem, if there is one. I print out Zebos quick and dirty guide for reference and start. I get my HTT to 325 without incident and decide that's plenty, I won't even need to go that high. Next is max chip capable.... I top out at about 285x9 for 2565. Hmmm, better than my winnie ever did, but I was hoping for higher, oh well. I test the ram with memtest at 280 htt with a 166 divider, 2-3-3-6 1T timings. Let it run overnight, no errors. Ram is solid....
I start testing oc's..... about 2.3G is all I can get stable! With all that testing I should be able to hit 2.5G NO PROBLEM. V-core is about 1.52, so not really any room there. Now I'm perplexed... what the hell is the problem? There must be something I'm missing, something I've overlooked, right? I start thinking and going to some of the overclocking sites and looking around.... then I remember something I saw at the Xtreme Systems forums. There was an issue with the NB on some of these boards.... seems that quite a few left the factory with inadaquate TIM on the chip. Thats all I've got at this point, so today I took my rig apart and removed the NB cooler. Sure enough, theres a VERY small amoutn of TIM under it, and it appears like it wasn't even applied on purpose, that's how crappy it looked. In fact, the area around the chip itself looks a little discolored, like it's been hot. Great!!! I clean up the goop, apply some of the white stuff (I've heard you shouldn't really use AS on the NB... shrugs) with a razor and button it all back up. Voila! I'm in business. Tested it (prime) for several hours at 2.4G, 1.45v.... stable! Right now I'm testing with prime at 2.5G, had to up the volts to 1.5 and it's doing fine after about 1.5 hrs. I've also noticed the little "hangups" my system had before, things I didn't even notice or think were signs of a problem are gone. I know I've got to let it run a bit more, and the real test will be games but I can tell this thing is purring like a kitten now...
Sorry, this was kind of a long post and maybe not very interesting to some, but I just wanted to share the experience and hopefully it will help somebody else out that's having some stability problems, or possibly get some more ideas thrown in.
) Last year I decided to upgrade to an AMD64 3000+ on a K8N Neo2 Plat. board after reading here on the forums about the great OC potential of this setup. I got the board and an 0433 winnie, a new case, an xp-90 cooler and splurged on an OCZ520 PS. Got it all set up and immediately had problems with my ram. Seemed the Corsair XMS 3200 memory wasn't happy in the board; it was fine at stock speeds, but if I pushed the HTT past 215 it wouldn't boot to windows, even if I had dividers set. Very strange. I figured out that one of the sticks was bad (2x512), but instead of buying another one I went with some nice TCCD ram, 2x512 Patriot XBL. That sucked because ram was so expensive last year... Anyway I get the ram and go to work. I manage to get to 2475 but not 1 Mhz more, and it wasn't completely stable either. The most I could get stable was about 2.2. My temps were good, and voltage increases didn't help. I was a little dissapointed in the oc, but the chip and platform are great so overall I was content.I ran with that for a few months and all of a sudden games would lock up once in a while and stability became an issue. At this point I just went back to stock speeds and decided maybe I just had a flakey board, as I had read some stories about some problems with the MSI boards. Or perhaps the chip was just not a good oc'er.... I didn't care, I didn't have the time or money to figure it out...
Recently I've felt the need for more speed with the newer games that have been released, so I try to crank up the winnie again. It aint happening. It doesn't want to do anything but stock, but now I'm determined. I do a little research, and being a bit strapped for cash I decide to try a 3000+ Venice; these puppies seem to do a bit better, and what are my chanced of getting another dud? All my other chips besides the winnie were great oc'ers, so I find a nice deal on an e3 chip, a week 36. Of course right after I buy it I see an e3 3200+ for about 15 bucks more..... :| Oh well, too late. I get this thing in the mail Wednsday and get to it. This time I'm going to be a little more systematic in my approach and try to nail down the problem, if there is one. I print out Zebos quick and dirty guide for reference and start. I get my HTT to 325 without incident and decide that's plenty, I won't even need to go that high. Next is max chip capable.... I top out at about 285x9 for 2565. Hmmm, better than my winnie ever did, but I was hoping for higher, oh well. I test the ram with memtest at 280 htt with a 166 divider, 2-3-3-6 1T timings. Let it run overnight, no errors. Ram is solid....
I start testing oc's..... about 2.3G is all I can get stable! With all that testing I should be able to hit 2.5G NO PROBLEM. V-core is about 1.52, so not really any room there. Now I'm perplexed... what the hell is the problem? There must be something I'm missing, something I've overlooked, right? I start thinking and going to some of the overclocking sites and looking around.... then I remember something I saw at the Xtreme Systems forums. There was an issue with the NB on some of these boards.... seems that quite a few left the factory with inadaquate TIM on the chip. Thats all I've got at this point, so today I took my rig apart and removed the NB cooler. Sure enough, theres a VERY small amoutn of TIM under it, and it appears like it wasn't even applied on purpose, that's how crappy it looked. In fact, the area around the chip itself looks a little discolored, like it's been hot. Great!!! I clean up the goop, apply some of the white stuff (I've heard you shouldn't really use AS on the NB... shrugs) with a razor and button it all back up. Voila! I'm in business. Tested it (prime) for several hours at 2.4G, 1.45v.... stable! Right now I'm testing with prime at 2.5G, had to up the volts to 1.5 and it's doing fine after about 1.5 hrs. I've also noticed the little "hangups" my system had before, things I didn't even notice or think were signs of a problem are gone. I know I've got to let it run a bit more, and the real test will be games but I can tell this thing is purring like a kitten now...
Sorry, this was kind of a long post and maybe not very interesting to some, but I just wanted to share the experience and hopefully it will help somebody else out that's having some stability problems, or possibly get some more ideas thrown in.
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