Manual Overclock not taking ...

I have a q9400 installed in a XFX nVidia 780i SLI Motherboard and its been running great for a while now. Recently I decided to overclock it to 3.0GHz and all was fine. It passed stress testing and seemed good. Later while I was playing World of Tanks the computer suddenly black screened and was non responsive. After a forced reboot windows loaded fine but my overclock was gone. Naturally I figured overclock recovery reverted the settings since it caused an error (not sure if there even is such a thing really). I went back to manually change the settings again and after I had reset it the settings had still not taken hold. Now after extensive googling I can't seem to find out why my overclock is not registering on the motherboard and why it is not forcing the cpu to 3.0GHz. I have checked the frequency and settings using WEI as an index (on OC the processor was 7.4, stock it is 7.1) as well as CPU-Z, coretemp, and some little gadget I found that checks the processor for overclock as well. they all report stock settings - BIOS settings are at 3.0GHz.

**additional** C1E disabled, CPU @1.20V (manual setting seems to be working here)



......... Frustration has set in. Please help?