<<Has anyone seen an overclocking guide for P4P800 (ASUS)?>>
Not really -- just bits and pieces. My experience with it is only recent, but without much trouble. My strategy has been to open up the bottlenecks at the bottom of the memory-hierarchy first. So I went with SATA150 RAID0 on the P4P800. And moving up the hierarchy, I elected to get OCZ gold-edition enhanced Latency memory (2 X 512) 1GB. And -- of course -- they have a full page on the P4P800.
OCZ has a nice database of motherboards with summary information about configuring the memory modules to the board, and with good advice.
My general experience -- with my own machines and those of relatives and friends -- is that there are "trade-offs" that will impact your decision-making about what processor to buy. In general, it seems that the faster processors for the 800Mhz FSB also run at higher temperatures. That's one reason why the 2.4C has a good following.
Here's an example. I have one machine with a 3.06"B" processor and the processor-core temperature climbs to 95F during video work and sometimes higher than that. At idle, with more than enough fans and including a pusher fan on top of the ThermalTake Spark 7+, the temperature never settles down to much less than 87F.
Meanwhile, on the new configuration with the OCZ's, a 2.4C over-clocked to 2.88 -- external frequency of 240 and memory over-clocked to an effective 480 Mhz, the temperature settles down to 75F to 80F depending on room-temperature ambient. Of course, I'm running a heat-pipe PIPE101 cooler on that one, but a friend's system with a 3.2C also only settles down to around 89F with a Zalman CNP-7000-Cu cooler and a 120mm pusher fan. We O'Ced the 3.2 to 3.47 so he could get full advantage of his PC3500 Mushkins, and the idle temp settled to about 90F.
So -- you have a choice. Run a slower processor with more lebensraum for over-clocking, or run a faster processor and expect more heat whether it is over-clocked or not.
The only way out of that catch-22 is to move up to water-cooled or "Vapo-Chill" solutions. Maybe you feel comfortable with a processor at an idle temp of near 100F, and I suppose -- since your applications will determine "load" temperatures -- you still have plenty of headroom there.
If you plan to run your memory at SPD timings, leave all the memory settings under "CHIPSET" at "auto" -- at least to start. You can either choose the overclock settings of 5%, 10% etc. in the BIOS menu or select "Manual" -- in which case you would just bump up the external frequency settings an integer or more at a time. I try to avoid lockups, so I'm conservative at experimenting.
Selecting "Performance Mode" from "Standard" to "Turbo" will open up the memory speed -- if you have memory with some headroom AND you either have lockups at the chosen DIMM speed (opposed to Auto, you have a choice of 266, 333/320, or 400). That is, with -- as with my choice -- DDR500, you can set the memory speed to DDR400 and Turbo will push it to the limit set by the external clock frequency.
With the OCZ memories at DDR480, I got Sysoft Sandra bandwidth estimates around 5.7 GB/sec.
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