Please help my friend out, he's been screwed

A while back, I was posting a thread about figured out that my friend has built a wrong system. His builder (another friend) went out and bought some parts, 3.2E with the P4P800SE. But 2 months later, when I accidently found out that he has a 2.8 instead. I never did check but today I'm certain that he got a crappy 2.8ghz 533mhz FSB Northwood. We went back to that store and complained but they refused to acknowledge their mistake. So we're stuck.

He doesn't want to spend any more $$ on the upgrade, so.....the last resort is to OC it.

At stock cooling, he can only reach 3.1ghz stable with mem run at 1:1 - 147mhz. Pretty sucky for his DDR400.

So my main question is that, beside additional cooling, what else can we do or he's basically stuck at that point? I'm not familiar with this board, so I haven't tried any MANUAL settings yet.

Please give us your suggestions: BIOS upgrade to what version? What settings we should play with, etc. ??

Thanks a lot

Cliff Notes: Friend built comp - novice builder - got screwed by the store and received a 2.8 533 instead of a 3.2E.

Happens to be the same mobo I have. First make sure you have good cooling and a good power supply, can't be stressed enough. Up date the bios also.Then for me the trick was to get rid of that AI overclocking then,
Lock the AGP/PCI bus.
Up the FSB in small increments until it becomes unstable, then turn it back a notch.
Tighten the memory timings.
If necessary up the Voltage on the V-core and/or memory too.

Just a basic starting point further tweaking will be required for maximum results.

Do you have the recipe? Did anyone check the CPU before it was installed? Did anyone touch it before use? Do you still have the box?

You can only overclock P4B's using the FSB. Up it a little (default is 133, go for 140, then 145 etc.)

You may get lucky and get 3.1 - 3.3Ghz out of it. The 2.8B wasn't known for being a great overclocker.

thanks guys, I did that, with the original 512MB DDR400, we couldn't get past 3.15ghz being stable. Then I throw in a pair of 512DDR333 (yes DDR333 with same latency and stuff) that's laying around, HOPING To give the guy some more RAM to totall out to be 1.5gb. To my surprise, we can go up to 3.364ghz now without any glitch or anything, haven't ran prime95 or any stress test yet. This is done using the 20% auto oc.

I didn't have time so didn't play around with the setting. With manual settting, I believe we can hit 3.4 stable. Then we'll try lapping the HS, with AS5, add some ducting cooling. Hopefully we'll be more stable at that level or hopefully at 3.5ghz.

Did ran the sandra benchtest and PCmark04, didn't lock up so I guess we're stable at 3.364ghz with Memories at 190mhz.

However, I have a question, the ratio is now 4:5 of which the memories are running at 190mhz. Is there anyway that we can set it so that it'll running 1:1 (lower to 160mhz) so we won't have to stress the two DDR333 sticks that much?