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All frickin' night ~ I'm trying to figure out why my Bios (init. screen) won't load.

I just upgraded my Ram w/ 2x Twin Corsair Gigs and wanted to set them to Dual-Channel.
Beep, pause . . . Beep, pause . . .  (Bios wasn't detecting mem)
I reset MB jumper to 'safe mode'.
Still, . . .only got the beeps.
~ Reset DIMMs in slots (over & over) . . .'till, finally, no more beeps.

Then, it started hanging (again!!) on  ~ "Initializing Keyboard Controller"
~ (still couldn't get into Bios or display screen).

All night, racking my brain ~ (WTF) ~ reset every frickin' device, unplugged, replugged, tested (over & over) ~ and read everything I could ~  'till this morning ~ (teary eyed and demented) I confessed and explained "MY problem" to my girlfriend, . . .who (within a few minutes) shows me the page on 'resetting the CMOS' ~ . . .(but) I told her I did that (several times) and even pulled the battery (a few).

. . . I just thought I "lost" everything in my Bios and began contemplating just getting a NEW MB,  ~ 'cause it would cost me about the same to take it in (shop) and have someone rewrite my Bios into the chip(manually).

THEN, lo and behold, I looked at my CMOS jumper ~ looked at the MB "User's Guide" ~ looked at the jumper, again . . .and went ~ WTF ~ I had it set to short\clear!! . . .all frickin night long!! ~ lol

Then, I thought I might have fried something on the board, . . .'cause the 'Guide' said  ~  "Avoid clearing the CMOS while the system is on; it will damage the . . ."  OMG!!

Neadless, to say, got it running again ~ w/Dual-Channel and clocking FSB @ 180 MHz.

My goal is to OC 'till I'm @ around a 200 FSB, ideally (et. 400 FSB), but once I start pushing past 180, the VCore goes up to between 178 V to 182 V . . .and I'm thinkin' that might be a little too much ?
[but the CPU temp. was only around 33 °C (91 °F) to 42 °C  (108 °F) @ Idle].

Anyone, know if that Voltage is OK?

[does anyone know what the Voltage is for the Athlon XP 3200+ (?),
 'cause that, essentially, is what my  XP 2500+ Barton will be @ 11 x 200 MHz]

. . .Here's where I'm at, so far; (after resetting my fiasco ~ lol)

[OS ~ XP Home Ed. (SP2)]
CPU    AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (w/Barton core)
Current CPU Clock       1984.21 MHz (11 x 180)
[Max Clock\speed         2200 MHz, 11 X 200]
       
Motherboard       MSI K7N2 Delta-L (MS-6570G)
North Bridge      nVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400
[Phoenix-Award BIOS  v6.00PG ( V5.8 ) 08/02/04]

            Temperatures
Motherboard        26 °C  (79 °F)
           CPU        33 °C  (91 °F)
            
           Voltage Values
CPU Core  1.70 V ~ when set to 1.65 manually @ Idle   
[1.76 V To 1.82 V ~ when set to x 11 Multiplier and 1.70 V (manually), @ Idle]
   
           Front Side Bus Properties
       Bus Type           DEC Alpha EV6
      Bus Width           64-bit
     Real Clock           180 MHz (DDR)
Effective Clock           361 MHz
      Bandwidth           2886 MB/s
    
          Memory Module Properties
          (Dual DDR SDRAM 128-bit)
Timings @ 3-3-3-8(CL-RCD-RP-RAS) ~ [original mft. settings] 
       Twin Corsair         VS1GB400C3  (x2)
       Module Size    1024 MB (2 rows, 4 banks) (x2)
   Memory Speed     PC3200 (200 MHz)
          Bandwidth     5772 MB/s

CAS Latency (CL)                3T (also, runs fine @ 2.5)
RAS To CAS Delay (tRCD)   3T
RAS Precharge (tRP)           3T
RAS Active Time (tRAS)       8T

Row Cycle Time (tRC)                11T
Row Refresh Cycle Time (tRFC)  12T
Command Rate (CR)                    1T
RAS To RAS Delay (tRRD)           2T
___________________________________________

I, also, just installed a New EVGA nVIDIA e-GeForce 6800 GS (256 MB) vid card, that I'll start unlocking ~ once I get my MB and RAM speeds settled.

Now that is funny....but don't beat yourself up too bad over it....done it myself almost in the very same of circumstances......

i have no idea how much voltage your cpu can take - i can however tell you that even a slightest over volt can harm your cpu - if not right away, than it the long run - although, many cpu's will let you safely increase vcore to a reasonable limit (you can find the processors technical details at amd.com)

I keep my amd right now at 2.75GHz @ 249MHz fsb (1:1 ram) @ 1.37vcore - great vcore

yeah rom-dos  i was thinking those speeds where kinda slow...

damn ROM-DOS i didn't know they could get that hot... i new i loved AMD for a reason... 

Yeah, girlfriends can do that sometimes. When we are tired, and about to give  up. They will say the dumbest thing that sounds too simple, and even though they might be wrong, they got me haeded on the right direction. ;)
I supposed sleeping on it was out of the question?
Happens on cars too, and believe me girls seldom know how to put gas in. 

[update]
Downloaded RivaTuner and unlocked my 6800 GS 12 pixel & 5 vertex processors pipes to 16 pixel & 6 vertex processors pipes
~ turning it into a GeForce 6800 Ultra!! 
[well, almost ~ . . .had to turn off one vertex pipe ~ dang]

AoA Forums   ~  Guru3D GeForce 6800 GS 256 MB (AGP) OC

Also, downloaded nVIDIA nTune 3 System Utility (performance optimization) and ran it, while it benchmarked and overclocked my settings w/30 passes ~ it was neat watching how it did ~ around the 21st pass it started max benching and from there I had about 5 total system shutdowns and reboots and nTune just resumed testing and adjusting where it left off at the shutdowns.


[Oh, I couldn't resist, I went in and re-set FBS to 185 MHz
and mem to 2.5-3-3-11 and set VCore to 1.675 V

so, here's where I'm at;
[the only benchmarks that beat my mem speeds w/ AMD's were the 64's
and the Shuttle FN45   (AthlonXP 3200+ nForce2-U400) w/ 2790 MB/s]   

CPU Clock               2035 MHz
CPU Multiplier          11.0x
CPU FSB                185 MHz
Memory Bus            185 MHz
Effective Clock         370 MHz
Bandwidth               2957 MB/s

w/Memory Timings  @  2.5-3-3-11  (CL-RCD-RP-RAS)
   Memory Speed Benchmarks
Read Speed                  2781 MB/s
Write Speed                 1052 MB/s
Latency @ 2.5-3-3-11      100.8 ns
Bandwidth                    5914 MB/s

  Sensor Properties
system       29 °C  (84 °F)
cpu            38 °C  (100 °F)
Vcore         1.73 V

. . .I'm gonna go play (and test) some games now!!  ~ lol ~   

[during first game load CPU Core temp only went up to 45 °C w/ VCore @ 1.75 V]
. . .what was really strange ~ was CPU usage was only 3 - 4 % during game!
 ~ the 6800 must be doing alot of the processing!  ~ way cool!!