TBird Multi Question

I have been fiddling with the multipilers on my TBird 1GHz, and I've gotten it up to 1.25GHz stable (if i put the FSB any higher, I get random restarts all the time). Whenever I up the multi to anything 9 or higher, the comp wont boot until the 5th or 6th try, and when it finally boots up, it says that the CPu is set incorrectly, and to press DEL to fix the settings. All of the L1 are unlocked. Is my processor not able to do any higher than 8.5x multi or do I have to do something to enable them?

did you unlock the chip or is it factory unlocked? If you unlocked it, what method did you use? Pencil?

Yes, I personally unlocked it. I used the pencil trick. Did I do it wrong?

It seems that it may not be fully unlocked. If properly unlocked, you should have multipliers above 9. I would recommend you try to unlock it again. Also, what's your stepping? Some of those TBirds didn't like to go much above 1300. You might have one.

In my experience, T-Birds are pretty OC happy. Your limmiting factor may be your motherboard and/or RAM. Of course, the pencil trick for unlocking a processor is something that I would consider pretty sketchy. But that's just me. Anywhos. What's the speed of your T-Bird and what kind of mobo are you using? What you might consider is pumping the FSB in the BIOS to something around 140mhz, and leaving the ratio alone. Or just see how fast you can set the FSB and still boot, when you find out what FSB will not allow your computer to boot, turn it down a couple mhz and then start bumping the ratio. It's a process that takes a while, but at least you'll know exactly where your hardware stands.

Doh. I'm a dork. You have everything posted in your sig. My bad.
You've got the same mobo I do...Except I have the RAID version. You've even got the same amount of RAM. Same sound card. Dude this is creepy. Of course your processor is 100mhz faster than mine.
I'd say try a new mobo that supports DDR RAM. I've got another computer that runs another T-Bird 900mhz that can easily be bumped to 1400mhz. It's one of them thar Soyo Dragon mobos. Not the new spiffy platinum edition. Just the plain old Dragon+ or whatever. Comes with a Smart Card reader. Very spiffy. It seems to me that mobos that support DDR the whole way around, and not just on the CPU socket, tend to be a crap load better at overclocking. But maybe that's just me.

Is there going to be a problem if I just take an eraser to the bridges, and start over?

Hrm...Good question. My guess would be there should be no problem as long as you're gentle. All the docs that I've read say that you have to re-apply the graphite after a while because it wears off. So I'd guess that there'd be no harm in using an eraser to speed things up.