ASUS P5Q3 Deluxe discussion

[Amurtigress]

Hi people,

until yesterday my system was getting stable only in a very narrow area of settings. basically the following:

Q9300 C1/M1, 3270 MHz
RAM latencies: 9-9-9-24-10-12-6, 4x1 GB Mushkin XMS3-1600, at roughly 1400 MHz
FSB Clock: 436 MHz
CPU GTL ref 0/2: 0.69x
CPU GTL ref 1/3: 0.67x
NB Voltage: 1.32V
CPU PLL volt: 1.60V
CPU Volt: 1.3250V

Any increase or decrease of the NB voltage caused Prime 95 errors after ten minutes. IntelBurnTest was running stable.
Any change of the GTL references made one of either core pairs unstable. Overall that made me extremely szuspicious, no system should ever be that much on the razor's edge, so I kept trying. IBT was showing me stable results at a far wider range of the above BIOS settings, but this was just too suspicious to not keep trying to improve my settings.

Now, all of a sudden....I tried setting PCI-E clock to 101 MHz since I had seen this to be recommened by Mushkin, OCZ and Corsair.
My system has been running 18 hours by now on PCI-E Clock 101 and NB voltage 1.28V. results?

7 hours 20 min. Prime stable! Using the 64 bit Version 24.14
Intelburntest stable, 20 cycles!

Could it really be that the PCI-E frequency is helping us getting stable?