DescentBB

I'm thinking about overclocking my northwood 3.0ghz p4. however, this cpu is on a factory intel motherbord. is it safe?

i don't have any experience overclocking cpu's, even though i know how, i've just been to paranoid to do so.
now i think it's time.

northwood p4 3.0ghz 800mhz FSB
2x512MB DDR-2 (3400mhz) dual channel
factory intel motherbord. (i really haven't investigated the mobo all that much. it's intel though.)
ATI Radeon 9800 pro 128MB

I'd doubt you'd be able to really overclock those Intel boards, they're built to the reference specs of the chip and chipset (as you'd expect) so you'll probably find that all the voltage and FSB selections are done for you depending on what sort of chip you feed it with. I can't be sure, I've never owned an Intel made board (and don't particularly want to either) but given Intel's position on overclocking it isn't exactly a leap...

you can put it in burn in mode thats it
5% increase go into the bios and see what I mean

I don't think that's DDR-II that you have. PC3400 wouldn't run at 3400 MHz. It would have 3400 MB/s of memory bandwidth. You should be using PC3200.

Don't bother to try to overclock the Intel mobo's. Intel wouldn't want people to run their products at a different frequency; they also can't tell other mobo manufacturers what to do. =P