For a company that came up with NetBurst, Hub Architecture and SSE2, Performance Acceleration Technology seems like a very tame advancement.

PAT basically works inside the memory controller to run things a bit more efficiently. As the example above shows (from Canterwood PowerPoint presentation), between the processor and memory controller PAT saves the system 1 clock cycle and from the memory controller to system memory we save another clock cycle.

While saving two memory clock cycles may not sound like a lot, when you consider the billions of calculations that are relayed between the processor, memory controller and system RAM, it can a huge difference if you believe what Intel says. What is really interesting with Canterwood is something called Communications Streaming Architecture, which we'll deal with next...

If you're interested in learning a bit more on i875P technology please read our AOpen AX4C Max motherboard review.

Overclocking the Asus P4C800 Deluxe:

We have not had as much luck in the past overclocking Asus motherboards as we had with some other brands, Epox in particular, but we did hear quite a few good things about the P4C800-DLX.

Slowly, I started to raise the FSB of the P4 3.0C processor.... but almost immediately I ran into a few problems at around 215 MHz FSB and had to raise the CPU voltage to 1.6V to help stabilize things. At around 223 MHz FSB we again had a few stability problems. This time, using Asus' special overvolting option we were finally able to hit a maximum speed of 225 MHz.

Not bad, but it's not the highest we've ever gone either.

The Asus BIOS:

There are quite a few memory tweaks available with the P4C800-DLX. From CAS latency, to RAS Precharge and DRAM Burst Length whatever you want to tweak you can in here.

Of course since I'm not a newbie at overclocking I chose to set the AI Overclock Tuner to manual but it does allow you to overclock your system up 30% for newbie's. You can adjust the FSB from 200-400 MHz FSB in 1 MHz increments, you can lock the AGP/PCI to specific speeds. CPU Vcore goes as high as 1.7V, DDR voltage to 2.8V and AGP to 1.8V. Up next, the benchmarks!!