trouble trying to overclock ram...plz help

this is my rig:
A64 3400
Corsair XMS ddr400 1.5gb (3x512)
74gb Raptor drive
nVidia 6800 video
MSI K8N neo platinum motherboard nforce 3 250

when I went into the bios to view the settings and look to overclock, I noticed that the CPU was running at 2412MHz, and the ram at 166MHz and the FSB is at 200MHz. well, since the ram is 3200...I figured I would up the Ram to 200MHz. When I did the speed was amazing...I mean really noticable. Loaded windows from post to running in like 5-10 seconds. However, when I rebooted after 15 minutes or so, then Windows XP crashed and would not recognize the operating system. I had to change the ram back to either 166 or auto (defaults to 166) and completely reload windows. What am I doing wrong?

166mhz is not very fast, u were correct in changing it to 200 mhz. check the timings and see if they are correct for ur memory. the only other thing is maybe the ram isnt pc3200 and is defauting to pc2700 speed cause the mb is reading what the spd(info chip) says on the module .

oh yeah, welcome o the forums..

thanks for the response flapperhead. and thanks for the welcome. here is the ram I bought from newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-145-450&depa=1
it says on there it's ddr400. the other nunmbers I'm seeing are:
CAS = 2
RAS to CAS = 2
Min RAS = 5
ROW = 2

it's killing me to have the memory at 166. especially since I saw how fast things were at 200. but why would the boot sector (on harddrive) be curruptted because of RAM? the error message I was getting upon rebooting was "c:\windows\system32\config\system corrupt or missing".

Well, setting it to 2-3-3-6 should work fine at 200.

japps said:

thanks for the response flapperhead. and thanks for the welcome. here is the ram I bought from newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-145-450&depa=1
it says on there it's ddr400. the other nunmbers I'm seeing are:
CAS = 2
RAS to CAS = 2
Min RAS = 5
ROW = 2

it's killing me to have the memory at 166. especially since I saw how fast things were at 200. but why would the boot sector (on harddrive) be curruptted because of RAM? the error message I was getting upon rebooting was "c:\windows\system32\config\system corrupt or missing".

Click to expand...

The memory controller probably can't handle 2-2-2-5 with 3 sticks of memory. Either raise the vdimm or lossen the timings.