If its doing your head in mate send it back under distance selling regulations (within 7 days). Reading reviews and forum threads on it its not the great a clocker and a bastard to overclock to/beyond 400mhz. This is why I told you to read reviews before you bought anything :X!

Anyway, if you can't sort your problems tonight then get it sent back - special delivery (via post office) or interlink express (collect from your house) will be cheapest for next day return.

There's this in B grade at the moment that I'd recommend for SLI:
Asus Striker 2 Formula NF780i £114.99

Failing that its Intel only which means down to one card mate. And if you're doing that you may as well buy a new single slot P45 board rather than faff around with B grade(or get the IP35 Pro I originally recommended for £68.99).

Will look at the thread again when I get home mate and see how you are getting on.

Mystery of the slot solved!!!!
... After trying everything I managed to organise a bit more space (my stupid-big memory fins are nearly/maybe touching the top card).
My knees are numb, my knuckles raw, eye's twitching..... but I've a geeky smile on my face.

Moving them a slot along and moving the HD to the bottom (where I'll have to improvise a mounting) gave me some room to play with and I must admit there were whoops on booting from the top card.

I'm not even going to look at the Striker board- it would be torture! And remember- I dont want to achieve anything more than 3ghz per core.... so this is an ok board right?

I had a read between the Diamond and the Asus you said to have a look at (I've said you only pointed them out to me and explained about B grade- it was another of my impulse buys!) and the P7N seemed to come up trumps out of the 2.

I must admit the fancy soundcard swayed me a bit as it might mean a better latency when messing on some sound stuff.

It's still a decent board right? Remember it's only an in-betweener- able to house a new card before I upgrade again.
I'm benching Far Cry closer to before now in Vista, but the board seems to be shining with a few games in XP, and most XP stuff seems tighter.
So hard to tell, but Im glad I saved a few benchmarks before... or roughly remember them.
I think a late-night session of Fallout3 will clear matters up.

I think now, with both slots working, I've no reason to send it back. Plus I have 2 working boards to tinker with. The experience has done me good. I reckon I could fit a GTX into a matchbox after today.... maybe 2 of them.

Anyway thanks again for your words of wisdom- I had a proper look at the top slot then and all became clear

I'm just really glad you're up and running and that the experience hasn't put you off mate. My advice would be to leave it at stock speed and make sure its stable. While youre doing that read through as many reviews and forum reviews/guides on the board as you can. OCZ will likely have memory setup info on their support forums for your specific board.

Once you have it stable at stock speed then have a go at optimising your bios - I can be on hand for help here. You can optimise it for out and out performance at stock speeds/mild overclocks or for a moderate to high cpu overclock. This includes messing with memory speeds, memory timings, chipset command rate and so on.

Next objective should be seeing how high your board will overclock by setting your cpu multiplier to 6x , your memory to 1:1 synch with your fsb and your memory timings to By SPD and then just raising the FSB to see where you get. If you want to add voltage do so as needed, if not don't and just be happy with any extra you get. Quick Test by running 5 loops of IntelBurnTest, thorough total stability test 200 loops of IntelBurnTest (an overnight job tbh). Once you know how high the board can go....

You then want to find out how high your cpu will overclock. Now you know your max FSB the board will give you know when you will start to see instability due to the board and when it is the cpu. Set cpu multiplier to its maximum/default and start raising your FSB. Again if you want to add voltage and your cpu is running cool enough under load to do so then add it as needed. If you don't want to add any voltage then just raise your fsb til you get instability then back it down and test with IntelBurnTest to fine tune as with your memory.

Example:

Memory is capable of 1000mhz tested at 2:3 (or 266/800) x 333 (6x333=2000mhz cpu).
Memory is also capable of 1066mhz with more relaxed memory timings tested at 2:3 x 356mhz (6x356=2136mhz cpu).
Board is capable of 400mhz tested at 6 x 400 (2400mhz cpu).
CPU is capable of 3150mhz tested at 9 x 350 (memory @ 700mhz [1:1|266/266|333/333]).

Optimum setting would be memory with relaxed timings, 2:3 memory divider, cpu multiplier at 9x and motherboard FSB at 350. This would give you 3150mhz cpu, 1050mhz memory speed and good motherboard FSB. Another alternative would be 8 x 394 (3150mhz) with memory at 3:4 divider (1055mhz) or the 4:5 divider (985mhz but use the faster memory timings).

Its about getting the best speed from everything mate . Takes a while! The thing is once you know roughly what your stuff can do if you buy a new motherboard or whatever youre not starting from scratch, you know your cpu will do approx 3150mhz and your memory 1000mhz for example. You just have to restest at the same settings to see if its got any better (or worse!) with the new kit you've added/swapped.

Have fun!

Thanks for the tips mate... as you know there's bits I understand and there's bit's Im still hazy on. I hope u'll still be on hand- the 3150mhz setup sounded perfect.

I think one of the OC problems I'd heard one review mention was that you can't set the usual 1:1 linked and synced option with just one setting as you can on most boards. Ill have to look into that.

Other thing is this Beta Bios I might need for Voltages. The readings are all there, the options too- just all greyed out.
Unless MSI have something like Asus EzFlash where I can flash from a USB stick I think their in-O.S. update program is set to auto-search.

Off with the case and in with the FDD I imagine then I was fiddling with it at one point and I thought it was giving me acess, then said unavailable while **** is set 'on'.

Damn my memory. Would prob be easier with a calculator handy too

***EDIT***

After checking this out it's the done thing if u have one spare... in the mobo manual anyhow