[NTLUG:Discuss] AM2 Based motherboards, Overclocking & Linux

[David Simmons]

Have been reading alot of reviews of AM2 motherboards...in anticipation of
the AMD X2 'fire sale' coming up next week:

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=2800
http://digitimes.com/mobos/a20060612A1001.html?www.dailytech.com

...and I'm interested in the 'overclocking' aspects of the reviews.

Has overclocking become mainstream and a 'suggested' way to run a
computer?  I've liked the idea, but have always shyed away just from a
stability point.  From many of the reviews - it seems almost 'expected'
that you would be overclocking your CPU and Memory.  Is this true?

I can see a bit more from a 'tuning' aspect with today's DDR2 RAM...that a
'sweet-spot' needs to be found based on the variety of memory controllers,
mother-board implementations, not much standards on the higher end, the
alignment of the moon & stars...etc, etc, etc....but is this really
considered 'overclocking' for the ram?

Any problems/issues with running one of these boards (AM2) with an AMD X2
(socketed for AM2) - with a SuSE 64bit OS (host) with VMware for 'other'
OS'?

thanks for any insight - dave