paul wrote
The Conroes have plenty of overhead. 300 fsb is a no-brainer for them, I'm running close stock vcore on my Gigabyte S3 and DS3's @ 400 -430 fsb.
Okay, so the mod may not help me much. I suppose it can't hurt to try.
I hate to tell you this, but the extra $40 or so on a better mobo would have let you really crank that cpu. Not familiar with that mobo, but if it's the 945 chipset, it's severely limited in it's overclockability. We seem to think it's a memory controller issue, as memory just refuses to run higher bus speeds.
I agree, Paul, and don't mind hearing that from you. But there's a catch: It's only $40 if you already have DDR2 and a PCI-E card. 
I don't, and won't be able to afford them for a while, so I opted for a mobo that would let me use my old RAM and AGP card. That way I'm in Conroe Country, enjoying a healthy boost to my RAC, even if I can't overclock it to its full potential.
I do plan to buy a better board down the road and push that puppy. In the meantime I thought I'd explore ways to get the most out of what I have. It's possible that I've reached the limit. That's fine ... I didn't think I'd be able to overclock at all, to be honest.