[Sophocles]

I've not had any sort of crashing, just that I was getting some of the recent BD-9s coming out with some pixelating on them.

I wouldn't have been able to OC my Q9550 even to 3.4 GHz if I wasn't controlling all aspects of OC'ing.

That depends on which stepping your Q9550 is. An EO stepping revision can hit much higher numbers than a C1 stepping can. If you want to know more just send me a PM and I'll discuss it with you outside this thread to keep it on topic. I just wanted to make that point for novice overclockers to read and take that into consideration as a means of diagnosing a problem before asking for help.

So it appears it has nothing to do with either my overclocking, nor BDRebuilder and x264... more like the drive.

It doesn't mean that at all. Crashing is just one possibility but pixelation can also be caused by pushing a processor too hot or too far.

For someone that is said to have OC'ed for over a year, I'm surprised that you'd mention such no-brainer type things like that.... I wouldn't have been able to OC my Q9550 even to 3.4 GHz if I wasn't controlling all aspects of OC'ing.

Not true at all. Probably the vast majority of currently working overclocks are badly done and waiting to fail or are producing errors just as yours may have done. I've been overclocking since I purchased a P5 160 Mhz processor and I still find the occasional error before I call it stable. Like many I used to run my processor as high as I could get it, stability test it with whatever means is available, and assume every thing is fine. It wasn't until years later when it became possible to backup video that genuine errors began to pop-up. Overtime I learned that's it's better to always reserve a little for extra headroom.