Dark_art_: As I said recently on another thread, usually computer not correctly starting while cold and/or random crashes are typical symptoms of a faulty power delivery system and are very similar to a unstable overclock. Those are related to capacitors aging in PSU or motherboards, specially if a few years old (urban legend says that a badly formulated eletrolyte caused all the problem since the Pentium 2/3 era right until the i* line).
This may or not be the case and probably wont help the OP but just throw it in the discission...
My system is fairly new, i think a year or two at most.
I used to have the hardest time with the ram with this Gigabyte motherboard, where it would restart 4 times before it would show the bios flash screen and then boot to the OS. It's slowly gotten better. (
Setting exact settings per what the ram says helps a lot more) So it's hard to tell.
I can't recall overclocking more than neccesary just to get it to work.
On the other hand, this
IS an older house so might have some older electrical in places. While i have it on a surge protector maybe it's getting lower fluctuations...