Ok i got a few questions which will hopefully be answered...

Mobo - Gigabyte K8NS Ultra 939 nforce3
CPU - AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 939

#1 - the nforce software that came with the system had a really cool overclocking tool so that i wont have to keep getting into the bios every time to change a setting :) its called gigabyte easy tune. Now its set at default right now.. which is 9.0x2000 which is only netting me 18008.00 at my base level... now should i use that utility to overclock? and what basis should i start it at... i was thinking 12x210 and than work from there.

#2 - how can i tell if its locked or unlocked? i purchased the chip retail...

AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 939
512MB DDR3200
Windos XP Pro SP2
nVidia Geforce4 MX 440

Normally the Athlon64 can't go above the original multiplier but cool & quiet allows it to set a lower multiplier automatically.
You can try to go as far as possible with only raising the FSB but do it in small steps of first 5 and later 3 MHz and run benchmark tests after each step to see if the system is still stable.
A special athlon64 trick is to lower the HT multiplier if you go into higher FSB setting. That way you can stay inside the 1000MHz HT speed range.
You can do the same with the ram clock by lowering it to 166 or 133MHz. With raising the FSB this goes up again automatically. As an example, if you raise the FSB up to 300MHz (50% above normal) the ram set to 133MHz will
run again at 200MHz (133MHz +50%).

The biggest OC of this cpu I saw was 2700MHz.
The set the HT multiplier to 3x, the FSB to 300MHz, the ram to 133MHz and the PCI/AGP clock fixed at 33/66MHz.
That thing ran even faster than the the FX55 and the Pentium4 3,46GHz Extreme Edition!
But they used a MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum!

So, what your saying is i got to keep it under 1000mhz

so what if i did this, using the easytune program that came with my gigabyte mobo lower the muliplyer to 5.0 and than raise the bus to around 250... than raise the memory to 133. do you think that would be a great place to start? or maybe 7.0 and 225 and than test and than do the first one.

Gigabyte K8NS Ultra 939 nForce3
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 939
512MB DDR3200
Windos XP Pro SP2
nVidia Geforce4 MX 440