So here goes: It's my second time overclocking--this time, I'm helping a friend with a Q6600, nV 650i SLI board, and two 8600GTS cards. Now, the nV 6x0i chipsets are infamously bad, so we try for something small--a 2.7GHz OC. We also decided that we were going to pull the system out of the case and put it on a cardboard box in the windowsill. It barely gets cold here in NC, but it is January, and it's maybe 35 degrees outside, so we figured that this would help. Now, this should be simple enough--even a G31 board can usually manage 3GHz or so. Well, we assemble everything on the cardboard box, and nothing. We spent the next hour and a half reassembling everything and trying to get stuff to work (including pulling apart a spare Pentium D system for parts) and we get nothing. It appears that we've just killed the board. The board was close to $150, and when you're 14, that's traumatizing. Now, the Asus 650i board that we're using uses a card that has to be flipped around for SLI/single card:
It turns out that while we're moving the system, the board got bumped, and the card popped out a bit. Reseating the card fixed the problem, and we hit an (amazing, at least for us) 2.85GHz
Count me in for Duke Nukem!