> But how a system running significantly slower could be less stable exceeds my imagination. Anything timing related can be quite finicky. Often it isn't the a

> But how a system running significantly slower could be less stable exceeds my imagination. Anything timing related can be quite finicky. Often it isn't the absolute speeds that is an issue but how that interacts with the signalling frequencies of everything else (CPU cores & cache timings, any other bus or participants on it, …) and you might get stable results by tweaking those. Also latency settings could be affected similarly. And the voltage range in which RAM and other components are stable at will vary on workload and signalling frequency. You may even find that your RAM doesn't officially support that speed and so its batches are never tested with those settings (or are and have been found to be less stable): the setup your upgrade changed to could be off-spec via under-clocking. That is why I tend to stay away from over-clocking: if you are not lucky enough to hit a sweet spot first time you can spend a great many hours trying to find a combination of factors that both gets gains and remains stable.