First attempts at oc'ing - major problems

[mahniex]

My setup:
Abit TH7II RAID
P4 2.0A Stock HS and fan
2 X 256MB Infeneon RDRAM (ECC)
IBM GXP 60 & Seagate IV 60GB HD's in RAID 0 (IDE 3 & 4)
SB Audigy
NIC card 10/100

Whenever I try to oc this machine it drives me nuts. I manage to get the FSB up to around 117 without any problems( Using FIX option and Vcore at 1.575v). The machine seems rock solid and i ran Prime95, SisSoft Sandra for a few hrs + a few games. problem is when i reboot i start getting fatal errors in Windows XP and it seems to get corrupted. In fact I have had to reinstall the OS loads of times
The thing is that if it does boot it is perfectly stable with temperatures of around 40C idle and 52C under load. But once I boot again it looses it completely and more likely than not I have to reinstall windows.
The windows problem also limits me form pushing the fsb further as when I boot I get something on the lines of ".... windows will have to shut down to prevent damage to the machine." even if I go down to the standard 100fsb at that stage the os keeps giving errors.
Any ideas? This is my first attempt at ocing and I thought I could do a bit better. I can't even mantain a 300Mhz oc on this 2Ghz chip!!

 

[gone_fishin]

Try more voltage and remove the thermal adhesive from the stockHS and replace it with Arctic SilverIII.

 

[mahniex]

I've tried pushing the voltage to 1.65 (The max in the 38 bios) with the same results. I am tempted to try the 77 bios and push the voltage further but I can't get my hands on a decent HS/fan here in Malta. Is 52C under load (3 hrs of Prime 95) too hot?

 

[gone_fishin]

If you go for more voltage it will even get hotter, so yes improve your cooling.

 

[mahniex]

Is 52C an unreasonable temp for a NW under load? As i said, I cannot buy a decent fan/HS here so I have tried to compensate by sticking 4 fans into my case, round IDE cables etc
Should I need more than 1.65 for this simple 300Hz oc? Or do I have a dud CPU?

 

[takiwa]

Improve your cooling first, before you do anything else. Yes, 52C is alot hotter than you want it to be...your idle temp is more along the lines of a full load temp (40-42).

Don't o/c it anymore until you can rectify your cooling situation!