1. I bought a good cooler to overclock my Pentium 4 2.4C HT to 3.3-3.6 Gz, but so far I can only use a divider of 5:4 and an FSB of 250 Mhz with PC 3200 DDR 400 RAM (250x4:5 = 200 Mhz the default RAM clock and 3 Ghz OC maximum with this divider)
If I set a 3:2 divider with any FSB above 215/220 the PC does not even POST, it gives beeps indicating memory error even if the resulting FSB is much lower than what the rams were designed for and I have to clear the CMOS.
Motherboard is an Abit IC7 and GeForce 6800 Ultra AGP, the PCI and AGP are locked to 33/66.
I tried switcing RAM sticks and disabling HT, Dual channel, high vcore but it didnt help.
Am I being dumb or this mobo cant set the FSB properly for the rams before POST with this divider?

2. Also I digged up my old P3 coppermine 550 Mhz and it kept restarting, then I noticed that the CPU temperature was above 100º, and noticed there was a huge amount of dust clogging the fan, after I cleaned the heatsink and fan, I removed the thermal paste, and decided to install the CPU withouth any paste, and now I can overclock the CPU to 733 Mhz - 847 Mhz but the temperature is only 2º or 3º above the room temp (I never seen it past 27º on Full load with stock cooler and max OC, I think the thermal monitor got damaged and is not measuring correclty, i tried different progs and BIOS to measure and heatsink is hot, or are those normal temps and is thermal paste useless?)

4. Out of topic, what retro cards have good 16 bit color quality for games that dont support 32 bit? I noticed that every ATI Nvidia and intel cards even recent ones in 16 bit there is like an almost invisible stipple alpha? dot matrix on the whole screen and alpha stuff like smoke and water, I have a voodoo 3 but the quality is only slightly better and has some sort of interference on the dac, the games I want to try are stuff like Hydro Thunder, Motocross Madness 2 and SWAT3 so they need powerfull cards, I was thinking about a Matrox G450 but I dont know if it really has good 32 bit and is a bit weak, I hear that the Kyro cards also have them, I dont think that a way to force 32 bit color really exists?

What about recent cards? I want to get a new rig but I heard that modern GPU are missing a lot of features and GL extensions, specially on AMD GPU for OpenGL games and that some DirectX 5-8 and OGL games are corrupted on modern GPU or does Nvidia cards still have lots of GL Extensions? Altough I wanted to try an AMD card with True Audio and better price/performance ratio, has anyone tried playing Thief 4 with it and is it worht it?

5. Is hyper threading really usefull on a Pentium 4? I dont notice any performance increase with it enabled, maybe only slightly when using a lot of progs at the same time or maybe its just placebo, but in games it has 0 impact and people say it increases the temperatures and that for OC shuld be disabled and that HT in some cases can reduce performance. Should it be enabled?