Nothing is working!
(Not that I've tried much but let me explain)
For the time being, my jury rigged cooling solution seems to be dissipating enough heat (IMO) in order for me to raise voltages and clockspeeds.
However, this is very frustrating. My stability testing seems to go well when I start at the normal 4.4 GHz. 20 minutes in and it's good. Because the temperature is fine, I bump up the clockspeed. At 4.5 GHz it passes the 20 min test, also with acceptable temps. So the cycle continues until I get to 4.8 GHz.
By this point I've bumped up the voltage a bit (not much I'll post a few pics here in a sec) and at 4.8 GHz the test passes again. So I bump up to 4.9 GHz, and I get a system lockup (Windows 7 desktop still displayed) after 1 minute of prime95 blend testing. I increase the main vcore voltage to try and see if that fixes things.
Unfortunately, I get the same result running prime95 for 1 min again, system lockup. I increase the voltage once more and problem isn't solved. So I decided to use a new tactic, setting the priority of prime95 to 10.
I know this is very dangerous. Now I'm getting Illegal Sumouts instead of system lockups (again I'll post pictures).
Funny thing is... I get system lockups at 4.8 GHz and 4.7 GHz AFTER getting locked up at 4.9 GHz (with reduced prime95 priority of course). I'd rather not have the priority set to 10, because then I can't monitor temps at all.
I wish I could explain it in a simpler fashion, but I just can't
(I'm pretty new to this forum-ing thingy too so I hope my massive text dumps of utter frustration and confusion don't utterly frustrate and confuse you too
)