I reset CMOS and started with fresh stock settings, assuming everything would be peachy keen. I've never really been one to mess around with OC'ing, I was just sitting around sort of bored and decided to break my computer apparently. At that point, I decided that the whole endeavor was not worth the hassle. So I relaxed the memory timings even more, and that improved things somewhat, but not adequately. Well, long story short, my system became very unstable, and initially blue screened while booting Windows. In this case I felt like both components, the CPU and RAM, had enough documented success with such modest overclocks that it was a safe bet they could easily accomplish this. But I'm sort of impatient so I tend to ignore that rule. Now just like I know you're not supposed to mess with the BIOS, I know you're supposed to attempt overclocks individually, changing only one variable at a time. This memory is well documented to overclock very well. Then I tried overclocking to 4.3 GHz with a fixed vCore of 1.05 (slight undervoltage) along with bumping the memory (GSkill 16GB, 1333 MHz, Cas 7, 1.5v) up to 1600, adjusting the timings accordingly. I know you're supposed to leave your BIOS revision alone if you're not having any problems with it, but for whatever reason I acted against common sense and updated my BIOS to the latest revision (at the time), which was 1.90, I guess because it looked like it added some features that interested me. I have an ASROCK Z77 Extreme4 with an i5 3570K. The instability started after a BIOS update followed by an attempt at a very mild overclock. But my understanding is that bus speed is supposed to stay pretty constant at 100.0 MHz, and that's what's it set to in my BIOS. I didn't notice the bus speed issue until I started having stability problems and programs started crashing, so I can't be sure if it's been present all along or if it's causing the instability or if it's even a problem at all. I'm having a very bizarre issue with fluctuating bus speed (which I'm monitoring with CPU-Z 1.61.2 圆4), along with some serious instability. I'm just at my wit's end and want to be as thorough as possible describing my issue. I apologize in advance for the long post.

For apple instal HWMonitor Pro 1.53