OC'ing my E8500 3.16

[gciszewski]

Let me start off by saying this is kind of a multi part question.

I was messing around with overclocking my e8500 last night. I was able to get it up to 3.8 OK and stable. However I wanted to get it up to 4ghz or so. I got it to 4 with a 9.5m and 444 fsb but couldn't get it to pass a prime95 stress test for more then a few minutes. I know it's possible that maybe my chip just can't go that high but from what I read out on the internets is 3.8 is pretty modest for that chip. this is on a standard asus pk5 board with an after market heat synch/fan. One thing however ( and here is the multi part of the question) is my memory setup. Right now I'm running 6 gigs of ram. I have 4 gigs of Gskill ddr2 1066 and 2 gigs ddr2 800 memory. I know I should probably just bust it down to the 4 gig gskill stuff and see how it runs right? But would I benefit more from pushing my cpu to 4ghz and loosing 2 gig of memory but gaining the fact that my memory is running faster. Or leaving it at 3.8 and using the 6 gigs of ram running at a slower 800 speed?

I primarily game on this computer. Im not I guess what you would call hard core but I do like to play newer more graphic intensive games. I'm planning on a video card upgrade from my evga 8800gt to either maybe a gtx460 or a HD 5000 series card depending on the price drop at xmas time.

Any thoughts?