@ Woolf2000me - sorry to hear about that. Such large voltage fluctuations shouldn't happen, even while loading the OS - well, at least I've never heard of anything similar. Seems some bad times have come for overclocking freaks - if we had sitted patiently on our @#$%%, everything would be fine now, I assume.
Merlin's bios and multipliers :
Well, I've done whole lot of tests, I've got whole lot of notes I've taken, but I don't have enough time now to describe everything and make such clear comparison as Naibot or Woolf2000me have done. Apart from that I'm going to Germany again and a lot of work is awaiting me.
I've tested at FSB200 with the latest Sandra 2005 SP1 and Everest Home Edition 1.51 - here is the list of mulitpliers from the best to the worst one (the least efficient one) :
1) 12x (rocks for low FSB speeds)
2) 10.5x (rocks for high FSB speeds)
3) 11x (well optimized, though a little worse than 10.5x)
4) 12.5x (for those with worse memory sticks)
5) 11.5x (this is what I call "a bad multi" - sudden perfromance drop!)
So, I've tested everything form 10.5 to 12.5, every test I repeated at least twice to make sure the results were similar. Allright - seems to be almost identical to what Woolf2000me had tested before, but the differences in my case were more significant and the sudden efficiency drop with 11.5 multi is something weird.
The rest of my problems I'll descirbe in a separte post - they are strange indeed.
cheers