my setup: - intel c2d e6600 - evga 680 sli 122-CK-NF68-A1 - 2 GB of OCZ PC 8500 SLI ram - 4 GB of OCZ PC 6400 SLI ram - zalman 9700 cooler - evga 8800 GTS 640 MB video card - thermaltake 750 watt PSU - maxtor 500 gb sata HD - pioneer DVD-RW - vista 64 bit sp1 --------- Used run just fine and at bootscreen, the RAM speed would always show up as 800. I never tried any sort of overclocking or tweaking. Then I got greedy and did the following: - took the cpu and fan out, applied some arctic 5 sivler and put them back on - updated the bios (downloaded from evga site) now at boot screen, ram speed shows up as 667 and when I run CPU-Z in windows, I can see that the cpu multiplier is showing x6 instead of x9 and core speed is showing 1600 Mhz instead of 2400 mhz and the obvious one: the pc runs slow. I have already tried repositioning the cpu and fan...and reinstalling windows but did not help at all... I am not an expert when it comes to messing w/ the bios settings, but any advice to help me get this thing to run at its expected speed would be greatly appreciated. thanks.

Adding Arctic Silver & reinstalling Windows was a waste of time. The BIOS update is what messed things up. The E6600 is a 1066MHz FSB CPU. It runs at 266MHz frequency. For best performance, the RAM should run at the same frequency as the CPU...in other words, 266MHz (aka 533MHz DDR). It doesn't matter that you have PC2-6400 (DDR2-800) or PC2-8500 (DDR2-1066), since the CPU runs at 266MHz, you should underclock the RAM to match it. Use the Clear CMOS jumper to reset the BIOS, then go into the BIOS & change the CPU settings to 9 x 266MHz & change the RAM setting from AUTO to DRR533. While you're in there poking around, disable all Spread Spectrum settings & make sure the PCI-e is set to 100MHz. "And that's the fishing line, because Sharkboy said so!"

I don't understand why you did what you did in the first place. As far as i can see there was no reason for you to do any of what you did in the first place.