I just wanted to drop in and say hello and put forth what's happened with me and my P4P800 dlx thus far....
First, I didn't even start out on the Asus route, I chose an Albatron PX865PE Pro II after reading the shootout review on this site. Liked the idea of the envy sound and actively cooled northbridge. I received the Alby at the end of last week. I originally bought some PC3700 Corsair (2x256) to go with the board. My PSU is a PCPower and Cooling, so there's no shortage of (possibly overpriced) juice. I may have just gotten a bum board or bum bios, but it refused to run the Corsair without errors in memtest using either the 3:2 or 5:4 dividers when over clock speeds of 250mhz. No matter if the timings were all the way loosened up to 8-4-4-3 just as Corsair tells you to do, it's a no go once you get to around 250. On top of that the Northbridge fan started to intermittently buzz like a bumblebee, so much for my idea of active cooling. So the thought of paying $190 for a 600Mhz overclock out of my 2.4C didn't completely sit well with me. Needless to say the Corsair was RMA'd and the board will be tomorrow now that the 'new' mobo is here.
So, the quest started again for a Springdale based board. After reading the shootout(s) and this thread, I took the Asus leap for the first time. Setup went well overall. I flashed to 1008 using the special "exe" based floppy and that went without issue. The only slightly weird end result is that the system refuses to detect my older ps/2 based mouse no matter whether PS/2 support in the 'boot' section is set to "enable" or "auto". So out came a USB mouse I also had and off to the races I went.
After feeling slightly burned by Corsair, I took a look at Kingston HyperX and Mushkin Level II PC3500. The Mushkin Level II uses Winbond BH-5 chips which are supposed to be very good, its advertised timings are X-2-2-2 for rated speed. Anyway, long story short, I ordered 2x512 of the Level II PC3500. So on to the results....
I started out using the 3:2 divider with 6-2-2-2, Mam to Auto, Performance to standard, 1.525Vcore, 2.75 Vdimm. So I started towards 250 where I hit the wall with the Alby and kept on climbing towards the somewhat elusive 275 mark....the result was much better than I was ever able to achieve with the Alby and Corsair PC3700. Naturally the ram is running below rated speed, but this was a starting point.
P4P800 / 275FSB / 3:2/ 2x512 PC3500 Mushkin Level II
So of course the next thought was to get the ram much closer to rated speed using the 5:4 divider. Timing for RAS to CAS needed to be dropped to 3, for 6-3-2-2, with all other settings the same.
P4P800 / 275FSB / 5:4 / 2x512 PC3500 Mushkin Level II
Looking real good at this point
I'm stopping here for now so that I can just play in general with the apps I use. I'll run a much longer series of memtest(s) over the weekend when I'll be away from the pc. Though I think the result will be okay since it was left to run for about 5 hours in each of the above with no glitches.
I've got the CNPS-7000cu on and working. At first the weight and size of it caused some concern, as the process to get it lined up correctly over the supports that slip in the retention mount is a bit tricky at first. A steady hand is a good thing here. I'm not using the fanmate controller to slow it down since it's nearly silent at max speed. I'm not sure if the Asus probe temps are completely accurate, but idle is around 28c / full load 37c - house has central A/C. If these numbers are right, that's dang good in my book for a nearly 1ghz overclock..... Once I get really comfy with the way things are, I will up the FSB again to see if the cpu has anything left. Should be fun trying to find out
Anyway, just wanted to give a thumbs up for the board and give a little info towards the ram deliberations going on.....
f-