FYI, I've tried to read as many stickies as possible.

My rig:

AMD Athlon 64 x2 3800 Windsor model: ADA3800CUBOX
Gigabyte M55sli-S4 award bios F10 (just updated a few weeks ago)
2x1GB Patriot Extreme Performance DDR2 800 PDC22G6400LLK (dual channel)
Dual EVGA GeForce 7600 GS 256mb SLI video cards
Maxtor 160gb ATA133 hd
Coolmax CXI 600B 600w psu
Sound blaster Audigy 2.
Cooling: Thermaltake Big Typhoon VX w/arctic silver 5; 2 120mm exhaust (one in the PSU) 2 80mm & 1 120mm intake; I also modded the gpu heatsinks by putting 1 30+ cfm 80mm fan onto each since they just had passive cooling. I have a home built fan speed controller too that has high low switches for all the case fans (for those interested, the switches use a ~30ohm resistor for each fan for the low speed setting, so when I have the fans all on low, my rig is nice and quiet and fine for idle/home theater aps; and when they’re on high, it sounds like a jet engine :-D).
Xion II XON101 case

Ram issues: first, are there any good 3rd party bioses or 3rd party programs for overclocking the timings of the ram? My bios will only let me change the clock speed and the CAS latency of my ram. Also, I can only up the voltage .3v giving me a max of 2.1v. CPUz says that my ram will run at 4-4-4-12 at 400mhz and 5-5-5-15 at 500mhz.
The best I’ve gotten the timings to (w/out overclocking the FSB) is 4-5-5-15 2T. What’s a little weird is that if I underclock the ram to 667, it shows up as 5-5-5-15 1T, and I can bump up the cas to 4 if I want. I’ve determined that at the 2.1v max, my ram is good up to just below 480mhz. Wish I had that extra .1v so I could push it up to 500mhz :-/ I’ve also got 2x512 dc kit of gskill ddr2 800 ram. The specs are supposed to be 4-4-4-12 but cpu-z says they run 5-5-5-15 at 400mhz and 4-4-4-12 at 266mhz. Gskill was no help, what a gip, So I pulled those sticks out when I got the patriot.

CPU/Overclocking: I can’t seem to get the chip to or above 2.5ghz. It’ll run stable in Prime95 for 20+ min (then I shut down prime) right up to just below 2.5ghz w/out boosting the voltage. Once I hit the 2.5ghz threshold, Prime craps out on me before 20minutes. Lately I’ve been trying to see if giving a little more juice helps since I got my typhoon. I changed the setting in bios from auto to 1.425v (it said in bios that 1.35 was normal, and bios increases were in .25v increments), then set the ram to 667, HT multi to x3, fsb to 280, and the cpu multi to x9. Prime95 crapped out w/fsb at 280. I’ve already determined that the fsb is stable up to around 300. When I dropped my fsb w/clockgen so that my cpu was at 2501mhz, it still didn't work. My stressed temps under these conditions were 51-53c.

Another try: cpu x10 1.45v; ram 667; HT x4 +.1v; FSB 250; Stopped Prime after 4 minutes cause I was hitting 57c with the case open. Incidentally, what’s the max temp my X2 chip can handle? If I read the AMD specs correctly, and http://users.erols.com/chare/elec.htm, I think it’s 70c. If that’s the case, is letting the chip run at 57c safe? I read in one of the stickies that you don't want to let the temps get above 55c, but that was for an intel cpu.

Speedfan: Before I started overclocking, I was using Easytune 5 for temp monitor and some cpu fanspeed control. Then I noticed everyone saying ET5 sucks, so I got speedfan, and noticed something odd. ET5 showed 2 temps: system and cpu which when I loaded with Company of Heroes, I’d see about 40-42c tops on the cpu (w/stock cooling and settings). Speedfan showed 4 temps: hd, core, and 2 undefined that matched ET5’s readings for system and cpu. The core reading in speedfan was at least 10c higher than the other “cpu” temp. So I was hitting 56-57c loaded w/dual prime95 under 100% stock settings and cooling. What puzzles me, is I think I remember reading somewhere that AMD chips don’t have internal temp diodes while Intel chips do (but I could be mistaken), also Speedfan doesn’t support my board in the clock tab. So I gotta wonder how accurate the readings are for speedfan and et5, and even more I wonder how they are reading them (yeah I know they get them from the mobo, but It’d be nice to know how they’re measured and where the sensors are). I'm playing it safe and relying on the speedfan core temp reading, but if it is reading high, that means I have more room, especially since getting the typhoon immediately dropped my core temp reading in speedfan by 10c (under stock settings).