Hey, I have seen some of your system pics on the main page!!! Great mods and great looking system. Ok for benching why would you want to drop back your DDR speed ??. In benching where as much bandwidth as possible counts then you wanna tune the RAM too and get a balance between CPU speed and DDR bandwidth for maximum performance.But back to your question about CPU overclocking BSOD codes 101 means not enogh CPU voltage and Code 124 means either not enough CPU voltage or not enough VCCIO voltage (Basically QPI voltage). From your current voltage settings I would up PLL slightly to see if this helps although soem chips like less PLL. VCCIO 1.15-1.20 and then raise Vcore slowly until it becomes stable enough to bench. For 5.3 you are looking at around 1.5+ volts in general depending on chip. Especially as your chip takes 1.41 to do 4.7. The chip I tested as part of the Max 5 gene review did 5ghz at 1.4 fully stable on water and benched at 5.5 with 1.58v again on water. I also messed about with a 2500K this weekend doing Linx runs and that took 1.6 ish volts to be Linx stable at 5.5, and this was at -38C on phase change. Ofcourse it would bench at much lower voltage but that was at cold temps!!!!!