New 9NPA+Ultra & Venice 3200 - Please help!

[valdamax]

Hi guys, I was encouraged to check this forum out with an inquiry I have as I'm a first time EPoX consumer. NewEgg has shipped the components for a new PC gaming rig I've been saving up for, and I've been trying to aim for the best bang for my buck. What I'm looking for is some help on trying to get the best BIOS settings/OCing tweaks to the system without going overboard - something stable for what I have that won't burn out in a year. Here's what's arriving tomorrow:

Mobo: EPoX 9NPA+Ultra
Video Card: Sapphire X800 XL Ultimate (FedEx delivered it while writing this message!!)
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 160GB 7200.7 (SATA/NCQ)
PSU: Cooler Master Real Power 450W
CPU: Venice 3200 (model ADA3200BPBOX)
RAM: Corsair ValueSelect PC3200
Case: Antec 3700BQE (was a painful budget decision to swap out the bundled 350W SmartPower for the Cooler Master in order to go with a native 24 pin PSU to avoid burn out on the 12V rail)

I'll be applying Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste on the CPU (and am wondering if I should do so on the video card as well), and bought a Zalman's 7700-Cu for the HSF.

I'm wondering if anybody can provide me with any pointers or advice on what overclock settings I should aim for with this rig, or any advice from experience as to what I should aim to do when putting this together out of the box - ie, should I flash with latest BIOS from EPoX before anything else?

I regret in retrospect the RAM purchase for the more serious OC speeds, but am hoping to achieve at last a stable 2.65GHz speed with this system, if it's possible. I think aiming for 2.8GHz is out of this system's league, and if it were possible, would just burn out the processor within a year. Please provide any comments or thoughts, suggestions, etc!

[Dave_Sz]

go into BIOS, ADVANCED CHIPSET FEATURES- set HT freqency to 3. Go into DRAM config and make the first 5 settings look like this 1t-2.5-4-8-3. Go back to the main BIOS screen and go to POWER BIOS Features. Set CPU frequency to 230, disable cool and quiet, cpu ratio enable and set it to 10, cpu voltage set to +.05 dimm voltage set to 2.9, chipset voltage to 1,7 memory frequency 133mhz. SAVE AND EXIT, run prime 95 for 10 minutes and SuperPi. After it passes reboot and go back to the BIOS and keep upping the CPY frequency by 5mhz and test after each time with prime and Pi. When it fails give the CPU more voltage. There are tons of guides out there, read them.

[SPQQKY]

You shouldn't need to up the chipset voltage. I have my board OCed to 280x9 HT x4 without problems and no increase in chipset voltage. I would only set vcore to +0.025v as 2.3GHz should be very simple for a Venice. In fact, you could set RAM divider to 166 and HTT to 240 as that should still keep the RAM at it's rated speed while only upping it to 2.7 or 2.8v max, Corsair Value doesn't like a lot of volts.