still able to enable PAT on the P4P800?? + other questions

I read a while back that intel was trying to prevent motherboard manufacturers (asus) from enabling PAT on the i865 chipset boards

did anything come of this? I am finally going to upgrade my current board (an old sis chipset/533 bus piece of crap) to a good asus board and was going to go with the P4P 800 deluxe

a couple other questions

1. what is the difference between the p4p800 and the p4p8x???

2. I have a p4 2.66 ghz / 533 fsb chip, should I upgrade to 800 mhz ddr or keep what I have? can you run the 533 bus chips at 800 ram?

3. can you still do pat on the p4p 800??

4. can you do pat on the p4p8x

also , what is the p4p-e-x

newegg has it, but i cant find it on asus website

1. P4P8X lacks any onboard raid or firewire. It is the slower 865P chipset also. No one ever buys the P4P8X, so I would steer clear if you are looking for top performance.

2. You would need to upgrade your CPU also if you wanted to run DDR400. The P4P800 does not have any dividers that allow you to run the memory faster than the fsb speed.

3. You can do PAT on the P4P800, but you have to do a couple bios flashes to enable it. Here is the guide. link

4. I don't think PAT can be enabled on the P4P8X.

You won't be dissapointed with the P4P800 dlx. I build computers for friends and family, and have used this board in 7 different rigs. They always perform great and never cause any problems.

edit* I imagine the P4P-e-x is just another model of the P4P8X. Avoid it.