You may or may not like Tom's Hardware Guide but from time to time they dig up some interesting aspects in the industry even you the enduser will definitely be interested in. On May 28th Asus had a press release online that stated you would be able to use the Canterwood exclusive Performance Acceleration Technology or PAT feature on their Springdale board. On May 29th this PR material vanished from the official Asus pages by pressure from Intel who stated that PAT was hardwired into i875. However Asus insists that the P4P800 is able to use PAT and they're now searching for a new marketing terminology. Read more...

But THG goes on because the were suspicious about the initial performance of their press sample that was as fast or faster than the i875 P4C800 from Asus. Mind sharpened by the recent MSI 865 Neo 2 silent overclocking functionality they went out and bought two retail P4P800 boards: Lo and behold, with the first comparison we hit the jackpot: the retail Asus P4P800 (equipped with the Intel 865PE chipset) turns out to be quite different from our test sample. Even a layman could tell at first glance that the retail version is missing quite a few components. And then there was another thing to consider regarding the performance of the Asus P4P800: can the retail version of the board attain identical performance as the version for the press? May 27th: On both of the boards, the latest BIOS (1006 Beta 010) was installed and tested with identical settings. The result we got was that the retail variant of the P4P800 is up to 11% slower than the press sample in the memory tests. The THG crew was shocked. Don't be too shocked though: The latest beta BIOS 1007.001 brings both press and retail on par. Metamorphosis From Springdale To Canterwood - Cheats & Tricks