For the dead chip; well any oc is totally out of spec and anything can happen after that, MFG didn't guarantee it, we take risks and it's our fault what happens. Hardly any user wants to accept their liability though and the easiest way is to always just get a new chip free so that's what they do. Problem is, if AMD inspect that chip, they can tell if it was oc'd just looking at the voltage paths.

Dave, as I said much earlier, IMO the 9600BE are the 9700s and 9900s unlocked. The NB speed on these were originally supposed to be 2000MHz. Thus stock volts you can still get 2GHz NB. However most Phenoms I've seen incl. 9500/9600 can do 2.14G NB at 1.25VID. With a voltage bump, they do 2.4G and more voltage gets them 2.6G. Haven't been past that to date and neither have I seen more. I expect all of them to do 2.4G with voltage but without voltage the limits are the same on all I've seen yet.

However, 100% stable, 2G seems to be the limit for 1.25VID NB.