I have attempted to Overclock my processor in bios
(all warnings about potentially frying it to /dev/null please)

in the bios settings it shows the processor running at the new speed however the system monitor in ubuntu is still showing it as running at its stock 2.4GHz (regardless of how i set the speedstepping in software.....)

is this actually being overcloced but not shown, or is it being clockd back to stock by the software?

also is it possable to have both overclocking and speedstepping at the same time? (ie only running OC at load)

If you are over clocking a processor, any power saving feature like Intel's SpeedStep or AMD's Cool 'n Quiet can not be used because they will use what the processor is set to at the factory. Also make sure the governor is set to performance. Over clocking a processor and using Linux will have a lot more instability and unreliability problems compared to using Windows. Linux utilizes all the resources of the computer while Windows does not.

yeh you found the problem...

disabled AMD cool'n quiet and it works fine