Stange OC Volts to get a stable AMD XP-M

Uhm...3.2V? First, I have an ASUS MB and it only goes up to 2.8V I believe. Secondly, doesn't high voltage really shorten the life of the RAM?

Oh well. It was basically one of my first rigs. Besides, the thing is that the 2.7V I gave my RAM DID work for about 5 months (when I had 2x512Mb) before one stick began to fail. Aftwerwards, I guess the manufacturing processes and crap never made such good RAM again  . I'll try cranking up the volts, but in your opinion, is the extra 36Mhz in FSB really gonna make a difference?

I could, but cranking those volts that high bothers me.... What is your Barton 2500+ at???

And oh, I finally found out that one memory slot on my MB is defective   . Now I'm back down to 1Gb of RAM but I'm back up to the 218Mhz x 11 again.

If I must, I'll consider getting that MB. Though, it's not that cheap @ $74. This is it right?

http://www.pcprogress.com/product.asp?m1=pw&pid=ABNF7%2...

The only thing is, will it be able to run ALL 3 sticks of my memory??? It says it "Supports 2 DIMM Un-buffered DDR 400 (Max. 2 GB)" and "Supports 3 DIMM Un-buffered DDR 333 (Max. 3 GB)"

And the real MB does come with a Chipset HS too right? (The pic shows a HS-less chipset)

That's an NF7-S2...Not what you want. Look for an NF7-S v2.0

Here you go:http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?sofocus=bs&sbrftog=1&from=R10&satitle=ABIT+NF7-s+&sacat=58058%26catref%3DC6&bs=Search&sargn=-1%26saslc%3D2&sadis=200&fpos=35750&ftrt=1&ftrv=1&saprclo=&saprchi=&fsop=1&fsoo=1

Wusy is absolutely right about that Voltage...I had a 2500+ XP-M running at 2.5GHz, 1.85V, 24/7 for 2 years. Its still going strong in my freinds machine as we speak.

Thanks for that info. Hopefully ASUS can get back to me before those auctions end (I'm really reluctant to spend any more money since I've already spent over $800; it seems that every time I upgrade one thing, something else fails and I'm just about out of cash.) But I'll definitely keep the Abit board in mind.

Quick question, can too much voltage actually cause the CPU to be unstable???

Well, I knew that part, and my CPU is cold enough:

Idle: 93F
Load: 107F

I guess I should have asked this instead:

Let's say that temperature is NOT an issue and a certain CPU in reality needs 1.7V to be stable. Will running it at 1.725V or higher cause instability??? (This would be for testing purposes as I do not know the voltage really required for stability yet)

Thanks wusy, I really appreciate all the help/clarification. Hopefully I can get my rig stable as I am getting quite frustrated with an expensive toy that doesn't work right...