New Overclocker

How long and with what settings did you stress test?

Did you overclock the RIGHT way, in small increments?

I'm frankly amazed it even booted...

Woah.

That's what I thought when I saw a Phenom OCed to 4GHz.

He's going to kill his computer was my next thought.

You WAY overstepped your CPU - By about .2 Volts.

Also, I would be very, very wary of that high of a northbridge - too high and you risk burning out SATA, USB, RAM slots.

Your processor is more than maxxed out - even though it CAN go that high, it's probably not safe. (And your motherboard... yeah.)

Those chips can be painful to work with, but you are lucky to be getting 4GHz. I had one for about 6 months and finally had to upgrade because I couldn't break 3.9GHz. Don't worry about that temperature, I had mine hooked up to a Corsair H50 in push/pull with some Arctic Silver 5 at 3.9 and was hitting almost 60C. Also, my voltage was well over 1.5V, and that was after 4 months of working on that overclock yet it was never quite stable. I would consider your overclock to be sufficient, and if you want to tinker with it some more you could probably squeeze another 100-200MHz out of it.

I would actually like to point out that that NB is a bit on the high side as DarkSable said, but I researched overclocking the 965BE for ages and the synopsis that I was able to obtain was: by the time the processor dies, it'll be outdated, don't worry about temperatures unless they exceed 80C, and lastly, keep the voltage below 1.55V. I know it sounds ridiculous but they are impressively resilient, and two identical 965's rarely have identical performance/overclocking potential.

So I'm seeing mixed replies here...am I awesome for overclocking that high on this processor or am I going to blow up my CPU? It's brand new so I hope it doesn't die haha
I ran prime95 on the normal settings when it first pops up, not the intensive RAM test. I did play dishonored afterwards and the load time was like .2 seconds, no crashes or anything. Prime is still running on my comp now, although it appears to have crashed after about 3 hours...damn. Can I tinker with this to keep my 4.0Ghz? Because that would be awesome

Update!! The system is in fact stable, I forgot my computer does an auto shutdown after not being touched for 2hours...yay! Anyway, getting back to the problem at hand....will it explode or am i good?

Update2! So I left Prinme95 running throughout the night and at some point it crashed my comp, shut it down and everything....however I know it ran at least 2 hours, and when do I ever totally use my CPU resorces for more than 2 hours? What do you think?

Update3! So I messed with the settings some more and I think I've got it. During Prime95 (blend test) the CPU is getting 1.3-1.4V which is safe (although under no load its at 1.52) I raised the NB to 2600Mhz and dropped voltage to 1.2V, and dropped my 16GB of Ram down to 1333. Everything seems to be going well, and I also installed a second fan on the heatsink so it is now push and pull, dropped temps 5C and now they dont get over 49. U think I'm good right?