Wow, damn nice voltage on that chip. I have no experience with that chip or 45nm's all other than an E8400 I put in my wife's PC i built a few months ago, but I didnt OC it.

About all I can susgest personally is to work on the RAM timings now, which may prove difficult with the 2 different types of RAM you got in there. I see you tried it at 8x400 which would have done the job with RAM @ 800mhz, but im sure the 2 different RAM speeds/types are throwing that off. Have you tried 8x400 with just the 2gb set?

I would take out the ddr2-5300 memory; it is holding you back. With that voltage, you probably have a lot more overclocking space. The slower RAM you have will not run at 400mhz fsb. Just get rid of it, and buy a 4gb dual channel kit when you can afford it. The p35-ds3l will probably require a little extra voltage to the NB as well to run 400mhz stably. Keep fiddling until you can get the fsb to run @400mhz, then start raising your multiplier. You'll have to raise your vcore settings, but probably not by a ton. I'll bet you can run 400x9.5 for 3.8ghz without much issue at all.

Also, be aware that that mobo has quite alot of vdrop. Check your voltages in windows, and use that to decide how high you can safely raise the voltage in bios. 1.36v is the "limit" for the 45nm chips in general, but you're probably safe with anything under 1.4v. With that said, I seriously doubt it will take that much for your chip to clock that high.

Thanks for the replies guys!

Right now I'm freaking out about heat, which I know isn't much, but others have higher clockspeeds and lower temperatures - and before I changed the heatsink it was running at 60C idle, so I don't want to push it too far. That's why I didn't want to raise the Vcore too much.

The funny thing is, before I slowed the RAM down to 675MHz (I think) I ran them at 2.5X which gave me nearly 820MHz I think, and they passed Memtest fine at 600%.

Suppose another notch of voltage won't hurt, I will give that a shot. Maybe it will get me to 3.8GHz and 1600FSB!

I know for sure that this chip can handle up to 74.1C as stated on Intel's website, and people usually agree that anything less than 1.4V is fine - so I'm going to try to keep it lower than 1.35V. Besides, 3.8GHz will suffice for me, if I do get that =)

Well, what it is that it USED to idle at 60C with the stock HSF.

I am going to take out the slower RAM.

I got a Gigabyte heatsink only because NCIX users rated it at 4.5 stars. It had a fan control as well, something that doesn't come with Freezer 7 Pro.

What I said is that NOW it idles at around 35-42C and under load never exceeds 60C.

In my experience, Speedfan doesn't work. I tried changing the speed on a Intel fan and also this one and it didn't do anything. Same goes for my old P4 system as well. So I don't trust that.