With great sadness, I must report I am unable to produce the same results as x-built-stan and memory. Using both posts, I tried each settings configuration and countless others ... literally. After two hours of trying every combination possible (yes I kept a chart) my setup will not boot windows stable beyond 3.54Ghz. I did all the right things:

33Mhz FSB incremental jumps
matched ram timings
correct bios settings
even temperate management

I tried the 9x and 8x mulitpier configurations without success. What's funny is I am able to boot Vista stable at 3.54Ghz with only 0.125v on the vcore and nb at 1.35, all others auto. One might speculate that simply increasing these values while increasing FSB accordingly would work but nope. GTL and TERM did not seem to have any notable effect.

A couple times I was able to post successfully and vista actually loaded ... for about 10 seconds before I started getting various BSOD's including:

Failure in ecache.sys
Failure in CI.dll
page_fault_in_nonpaged_area

I went even so far as to remove 2 or my 4 dimms to reduce stress on NB. I also increased all volt measurements to max and still no boot. A couple times got really scary because after it was clear that a post failed I was unable to power down the machine by holding power button. In some cases not even the clear CMOS button would work and I would have to unplug all power and reset.

I have a feeling that increasing volts higher and higher can also lead to instability even with the best cooling solutions. My 3.54Ghz stable configurations fails if I add more volts to vcore or NB, so I have learned that more is not always better, and that sometimes you need to find the happy medium. Officially I tried all of the below configurations:

Shooting for 3.888Ghz -->

For all tests, FSB set to 1728, ram set to 864, multi at 9x and dimms set to 2.10v:

NB Tests >
1.45 + all possible vcore voltages
1.4 + all possible vcore voltages
1.35 + all possible vcore voltages
1.3 + all possible vcore voltages

NB Tests + GTL at 65 and TERM at 63 >
1.45 + all possible vcore voltages
1.4 + all possible vcore voltages
1.35 + all possible vcore voltages
1.3 + all possible vcore voltages

NB Tests + GTL at 65 and TERM at 63 + SB at 1.6 >
1.45 + all possible vcore voltages
1.4 + all possible vcore voltages
1.35 + all possible vcore voltages
1.3 + all possible vcore voltages

No possitive results. Total tests 144. I also tried a few tests with DIMM's at 2.20v for the hell of it. To avoid potential FSB holes, I did about 20 tests using different FSB and multipier settings. No go. I think it's safe to say for whatever reason (BIOS, RAM type, temps) my board will not ever exceed 3.54. I do not believe this will be corrected by BIOS updates. x-built and memory have clearly demonstrated that no BIOS update is needed to push the E8400.

In closing I would like to thank all who have assisted me in my quest. I will continue to monitor this thread just in case I have missed something or a magical fix is discovered. Many thanx.