Weird i7 Issue while overclocked

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A couple months ago I sussesfully Overclocked my i7 920 to 4Ghz. I ran it at that for a few weeks and decided I wanted to cut the noise down a bit, so set it down a notch to 3.8Ghz.

Recently, with the stress of exams etc, I decided I needed a little bit more stress :P, so I decided to get the memory speeds running at 1600Mhz. Prior to this I had ran them at 1260Mhz or less because I have never got it Prime or LinX stable with a higher frequency.

After a lot of tinkering with settings, and I mean a lot (+ 20 attempts atleast), I finally got the PC through a 20 pass of LinX at 3.8Ghz and 1560Mhz DDR3 speed with max memory used, using the following settings :

Vcore 1.195
VTT 1.38
DRAM auto (only seems to work on auto)
everything else on auto
Ram timmings - 8-8-8-24 T1 @ 1566
BCLK 181 x 21

It was only when I played around with the advanced RAM settings (something which I am lead to believe should be unessasary when OCing on Biostar boards) that I got this through LinX.

Passed 3DMark06 and HeavenBenchmark 2.0.

Loaded up some multiplayer L4D2 (always found this to be a good testing game, and fun at the same time). At irregular intervals in L4D2, the screen would freeze up and the sound would loop. This would happen for 2 to 5 seconds and then the game would resume normally. After a few of these events the game froze up completly, and 10 seconds later crashed to desktop (another time I had to force close with crt-alt-del).

This process was repeated in a few games, before I decided to temporarily put it back to RAM 1140 Mhz.

The fact that the game glitches like this seems to suggest a QPI/Memory problem, and the fact that it can play for a while suggests the system is unstable, but not far off-stablity.

Any veterans have any clue as to what could be causing these weird in game issues? Happens in Napoleon Total war aswell. Could it be an I/O Issue, something need more volts?

The memory btw is OCZ Platinum 6BG 1866, which ofc is proving to be a nightmare to run anywhere near 1600, even at stock. Biostar x58A mobo.
 
Well, you could rule out the cpu by running prime small ffts to see if your cpu clock is stable (which by the sounds of it, it should be). What dram volts have you tried? Sounds like it needs a bit more juice.
 
I have been runnig Small ffts for a while now just as a precaution, even though it seems unlikely core voltage is the problem. The reason DRAM is on auto is my mobo has a huge variation between input voltage and actual voltage, and therefore auto seems to set more accurate values (voltage
reads 1.64 volts DRAM).

I also cannot see why I would need more than 1.38 volts VTT, as that is already higher than most people need to run for higher memory speeds(2000 Mhz ++).

I wonder if there is anything I am missing, QPI/PCIE volts, or maybe northbridge/southbridge voltage. Do many people adjust these for i7 overclocks?, from the research I have already done most seem to leave these on auto.
 
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