New build - a couple questions...

Hey everyone, I'm a long time reader of Tom's Hardware, but this is my first post.

Ok, I just ripped my old PC apart, sold it on ebay and then built a new one. I got a great deal on a AMD9600/3870 so I figured that it was worth dealing with the TLB bug (well the patch, I mean). I put everything together and got AMD Overdrive. I bumped it (in increments) to 2.7 and turned off the patch. I left it stress testing over-night and it worked great.

So far it seems like there is no problem. All I want to know is how to make the system start up with the patch disabled. It will restart overclocked, but I cannot make it do it with the patch disabled. Is it just not possible?

Also it will not let me put my ram to their correct timings. The ram I have is supposed to run at 4-4-4-12, but it's at 5-5-5-18. I know that it's not that big of a performance difference, but I just want everything right. The CAS drop-down menu in Overdrive is grayed out and there are no settings in the BIOS to do it there.

This is my setup:
Phenom 9600 @ 2.7Ghz (Overdrive 2.0.14)
MSI K9A2 Platinum (Bios 1.0)
4 GB Corsair 6400C4D (5-5-5-18)
ATi Radeon HD3870 @ 837 core & 1176 mem (catalyst 8.2)
Thermaltake Toughpower 1200w (overkill PSU left over from 8800 rig)
2 Seagate 7200 500GB drives
XP 64 with all updates

The system runs really great, I get around 12k (only 9k stock with patch, eww) in 3dmark06 and if I wasn't so easily distracted by a couple quirks I could settle down and get to gaming.

MSI has gotten up to bios 1.3 which I don't know if I should flash to. I'm pretty sure that you're only supposed to flash if it directly fixes an issue.

Anyways, I know this is a lot of info, but I figured I'd get it all out of the way so I don't waste your time by leaving something out.

Thanks in advance.