try an additional power supply for the card alone.

Don't have one Nate.

It's a ABS Tagan BZ1100.

 
Well, there's your problem.   
 
If you read online reviews, most will say that the power supply is great.  But I challenge you to find one which really pushed the power supply even close to its limits.  At high power draw is where the power supply will fall on its face.  It is unfortunate that most of the online reviews are only loading it to 700-800 Watts.  I wonder if it is on purpose...

hey ty_ger...did you ever get that 1600 mhz ram for your laptop?

Yeah, I did, but it really didn't help my CPU overclock. I wish I knew more what I am doing. You being the laptop king, do you have guidance? I assume my stability issues are related to QPI or PCI-E. Huh...

???

I might do some vmod research. I am sure I can figure out some way to pencil mod it.

Sorry for the second post. For some reason this forum doesn't let me edit my posts any more now that hey made it 'cell phone friendly'. :S

when you say it didnt help...what exactly do you mean?
and how high did the ram over clock to?

Well, my max stable overclock stayed about the same. I lose stability at around a 155 Mhz base clock regardless of if I use 1333Mhz or 1600Mhz memory. This places my memory around 1550Mhz.

The odd thing is how it falls on its face. It seems perfectly stable at one sppeed, but a 0.5 Mhz base clock increase will cause it to fall flat on its face whether under load or idle. It doesn't act like a core instability or a memory instability. PCI-E? QPI?

try voltage. that's what the main problem would be.
and i think i had kingston memory 1333 up to 1620 or so before. ill see what it does when i get my laptop back later this week.

So i have a long weekend, so i am reinstalling my OS on my main rig to clean it up some. I also plan to install some bench OS's on a seperate hdd. A few questions though.
 
1. With my current setup, my hdds are in Raid 1 in the normal sata ports (black ones). Whenever i crashed from OC'ing, the raid would break and i would have to wait all day for it to fix. If i put the 2 hdds in Raid on the red ports (jmicron, correct?), would they not f-up if i crashed? Also would i still need to dl IRST (Intel rapid storage tech)?
 
2. I plan to install multiple bench OS's. Should i install each of them on their own hdd, or would be ok to partition a bigger hdd for multiple OS's (probably 4)? Thinking performance wise for the normal benches (3dmark all, superpi, wprime, etc.)
 
3. To be able to select my OS upon boot, i have install OS's from oldest to newest, correct? What about if i install multiple copies of 1 OS, ex. XP pro 32 and 64?