Unable to OC on K8N SLI Platinum
 

Hello all.

I recently purchased a new system with the following specs :
- AMD64 3000+ Venice (939) boxed cooler (runs at 38°C)
- MSI K8N SLI Platinum (latest bios 3.6)
- Corsair Twinx matched pair (TWINX1024-3200C2)
- MSI NX7800GTX-256MB
- Western Digital 160GB SATA (7200rpm)
- Running on Windows XP x64

Hoping to see a good improvement in gaming, coming from a P4 2600 (@3000) with 9700Pro, I was rather dissapointed to notice it running even a bit slower then my old system.
A small benchmark test gave me :
SuperPI (1mil) : 47 seconds
3DMark05 : 7207
(no idea if this is good or bad)

When I looked in the BIOS I noticed that the memory's default settings where 3-3-3-8 T2.
I have read that T2 is a A64 killer so I checked the timings on the Corsair site and changed the timings to 2.5-3-3-6 T1.

A new benchmark gave me :
SuperPI (1mil) : 46 seconds
3DMark05 : 7271
Not much of an increase ...

After that I started looking at A64 OC guides and started with the first step => HTT/FSB
I did as described :
- disable cool and quiet
- disable automatic settings
- set memory to 100MHz
- HTT multiplier at 3
- CPU multiplier at 8 (default is 9)
The systeem boots like this but whenever I raise HTT (even with 1MHz) the system doesn't boot anymore. Screen stays blank, no beep codes and I need to clear the BIOS before it will boot again.

Am I doing something wrong here ? Any hints would be greatly appreciated.