hunter, what kind of cooling are you using? Im curious. People have been getting their 3000+ up to 2.7 on high end air. If you are using air, it should be that hard with a 3500+ since it has a 11x multiplier. so thats 250x11 which is 2750. The 3000+ need to be 300x9 which gets better memory bandwidth than you thus, will perform a little bit better.