well i got somewhere... installed 3dmark03 and loaded my sketchy settings... the reboot crash occured during the benchmark, which actually made me happy cause now i had a better way of testing it.

i tweaked the NB volts higher that didn't help. even tried running the test non-SLI and it seemed to reboot even faster. all of the reboots were occuring at different times during the test there seemed to be no pattern.

so i started fiddling with the GTL's ... i had them set at the "sweet spot" of 1.44v and 170 95 85... tried them a bit higher and the test seemed to run a bit longer before rebooting. finally ended up with GTL's of 180 100 90 and 3dmark03 passed for the first time ! ! i ran the test 3 more times and it passed each time. then ran the 3dmark05 and 3dmark06 tests and both passed. loaded an old supcom save with a lot of units and that seemed to go OK too...

SO.... to make a long story short... i mean, i knew the GTL's were important cause i've mentioned them in almost every post these past couple days.. but MAN they are _really_ important. unless i'm mistaken we're talking about tweaking millivolt settings yet it seems to have a huge impact on stability.

so i think i've found a new sweet spot at 1.44 and 180 100 90. which doesn't really add up cause the Nvidia GTL reference table says the VTT should be 1.55 at those GTL's but whatever works i'll take it... i'll probably need to test further with another prime blending session but for now things are looking good.