Friend's Overclock is weird

[Factorxfiles]

Alright, long story short, I got a friend of mine the following setup:
ASUS A8N5X
Opteron 165 CCBBE
2 gigs Kingston Value Ram
EVGA 7600GT
Aspire 520 (or 530 or something close) PSU.

He called me up today, and wants some help overclocking it. I walked him through the usual process of changing the dram frequency down, bumping up voltages carefully, increasing FSB speed, etc. I knew with that CPU he should be getting no less than 2.6, so we were aiming for that first. Well, it got there easily, so we kept upping it, assuming we would find the maximum and work backwards. Well, it posted (single beep, bring up ASUS screen, seems to function normally) all the way up to freakin 3.6 ghz ON STOCK COOLING! The motherboard capped at 400 mhz FBS, and with a 9x multi, that's the limit. I was blown away, told him to try and get to windows. I assumed it wouldn't make it, but just posting at that speed is pretty insane. Well it didn't make it to windows. We lowered it, lowered it, lowered it... Eventually we were pretty pissed, since it was back down at 2.5 and wasn't making it anywhere past that green asus screen where it prompts for the bios. We tried all the usual tricks (101 pci express, raise/lower voltages, tweak ram voltages, increase timings, all that) and we can't get it to windows at anything past stock. Any ideas?

EDIT: Problem solved.

 

[mavalpha]

Something wrong, I'd say with the board. 3.6GHz shouldn't even POST on anything short of dry ice.

 

[djBon2112]

^^ Yep.

Upgrade your bios then try again from stock.

AND work UP, not DOWN. Throwing your comp up to a high FSB fast isn't good for it. Go up slowly (no more than 5 MHz at a time), and make sure it boots and runs a short S2004/Orthos test. Then restart and go up again.

 

[Factorxfiles]

He was upping it at 10 mhz FSB at a time, not straight to 400. Also, just got the asus bios update utility and checked his bios rev. and it's the latest one.

EDIT: I forgot entirely about the HTT Link. *smacks forehead* Never again shall I help overclock by giving phone walkthrough.