A7N8X owners: important notes
 

First pay attention to what BIOS you get. Only 1001C and 1001E are reported to work well.
Next remove the NB heatsink as soon as possible. See that pink chewing gum ? It does *not* make contact with the chip !!! And that's confirmed by many A7N8X owners.
2 solution :
- lap the HS (it needs it badly) and apply thermal goop. Notice how the center of the chip is 'recessed'. Make sure that 100% of the surface makes contact with the HS bottom, through goop at worse. Yes that's about 0.1mm thick. If that gives you the chills you can lap the NB as well..
- replace it with a HSF or a waterblock.

Finally, with current BIOS the max reported speed is 195-196 sync on the FSB. 3DMark is not a good test. Try to launch a game such as Morrowind, UT2003 or Mechwarrior4 and play it. If after maybe 1h of gaming you've got no crash, then and only then it's stable.

With a watercooled NB and Corsair XMS3200 CAS2 my max freq is 196MHz sync. Not so bad, 4MHz short of 200, apart from benchmark addicts one will not notice any difference.

And, of course, there's always the L12 bridge issue with the 333mhz chips.

I'm running at 200 x 12.5 stable. CPU at 2V and VDIMM at 3V. Now if I knew where to VMOD the VDD?

What do you call "stable", 3DMark and Prime95 run fine ? That's not enough. What about a game, say UT2K3, for a few hours ?

hey gmat, how did you get the heatsink off the chipset ?
i got my waterblock for it today but it wont come off. I pushed the pins through the board and tried to pull it off, but its just not coming off. i pulled hard enough to bend the board...
i dont see any pink stuff either. What bios did your board come with ? mine came with 1001.E and could it be a new revision with the heatsink glued on it ?

Try gentle twisting......