VirtualDub offers the ability to edit any AVI video to convert it to a different compression format. In this case we will compress it into DivX 5.03 video, so what do the results show?

    Here the results are very close together, unlike the XMPEG results the results here are very close with the top to bottom results being no more than 4%.  The dual channel memory of the MSI and DFI boards is just over 1.5%.  The DFI motherboard still offers very good performance with very little difference between all of the motherboards.  What about when we encode the video into DVD compliant MPEG-2 video/audio?

    TMPGEnc is one of the most cost effective and higher quality video encoders available, though it really does take a lot of the CPU power and memory bandwidth to encode video here.  Lets see how the DFI motherboard performs against the MSI motherboard.

    The graph may seem odd at the moment, but looking at the results will show the information. On the bottom of the results, we see the actual FPS that the program took to render the video. On the top are the results for the actual CPU time that it took the program to render the video. If we look at the CPU time results the DFI and the MSI motherboard are closer, only 2.5% slower than the dual channel MSI motherboards results. Looking at the actual results, we see that the DFI motherboard offers 12% less performance than even the slowest motherboard. Why this is is unknown but it shows that so far the DFI motherboard is pretty inefficient when it comes to rendering this video. Now let's look at some other tests to see how other programs perform.

Other Software

   One of our only synthetic pieces of software we are using for testing, PiFast, is not a totally useless benchmark. It does a large amount of mathematics, and it stresses the memory bus, as well as the FSB. How does the DFI motherboard fare here?

    Here we see that the two motherboards tested here don't have the same performance level as the two Abit motherboards that Hubert reviewed some time ago.  Compared to the MSI motherboard the DFI motherboard is about 2% slower than the MSI motherboard.  In single channel mode, the MSI is just under 2% slower than the DFI motherboard.  How about with 3D rendering, how does this motherboard compare to the MSI 865PE Neo2?

    Truespace 4.2 is a budget minded 3D rendering program aimed at the basic user who is learning how to do 3D modeling.  This is very tough on the CPU and the bus of the CPU.  How does this work on this motherboard?

    What can we note here?  The DFI motherboard is about 2% slower than the MSI motherboard in these tests.  It also is 1.5% slower than the Albatron motherboard which is running on single channel memory.  The single channel  MSI 865PE takes the last place in this test, 1.2% behind the DFI motherboard.

    New to our tests is OfficeBench which is designed to test MS Office in a real life situation using multitasking and large amounts of data among all four different programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, IE).  We also used a level 3 MAPI (e-mail) stress tester as well as a level 2 Media player stress tester.  Let us look at the results with each test added to give the total time taken, with the task switching time added.

    Here is one of the few places where the DFI motherboard wins the results by just over 3.5%.  It is slightly faster in the Word, PowerPoint and IE sections of the test.  It is slightly slower in Excel as well as the task switching section of the test. The times here are in the 35-40 second mark with the difference between best and worst being just around 3 seconds. One thing about this test is that it truly tests the multitasking aspects of a system with Office installed.

Conclusion

    So having looked over this mid-range 865PE motherboard, what can we conclude about it, both by itself, and in comparison to our other motherboards tested here?  

    Let's first take a brief review of the layout of this motherboard, and the included features.  The motherboard contains all that you would expect from any 865PE motherboard, with AGP, dual channel memory, and Serial ATA drive connectors, as well as a plethora of USB connectors.  The inclusion of an extra SATA RAID chip is very nice as it gives you a total of 8IDE device points for various combinations of hard drives.  The lack of a fan on the 865PE is a good/bad thing, as it helps keep the motherboard quiet, but at the slight cost of keeping the chipset cool.  The major things lacking from the package were any extra USB cables or any Firewire cables, which is extremely annoying as they should be included as standard pieces.  I hope that DFI begins to include these in the package, as they don't cost much and make the package complete.

    Next is the BIOS and the overclocking prowess of this motherboard.  The BIOS is a standard Award BIOS with some minor tweaks applied to it.  One of the major tweaks is that of CMOS Reloaded, which offers the ability to save multiple settings to reload at any time.  This is a great bonus to those who like to have multiple RAM settings to make sure that the system works fast without having to do much.  Moving to the overclocking ability of this motherboard, it is fairly good, with the ability to actually have PC4000 memory run at slower speeds, unlike previous 865/875 based motherboards.  The overclock made it to about 260MHz before we hit a wall, though the voltage was about 0.2v lower than its set voltage, which isn't very good.

    As for performance of this motherboard we see that in most things its either first or second to the MSI 865PE.  In games it takes first place in memory intensive games such as Jedi Knight II, but comes a fairly close second in a more CPU intensive UT2003.  In video encoding it takes a very close second place to the MSI motherboard, in the tests that use DivX 5.03.  However when we look at TMPGEnc we see something very odd, the DFI motherboard is horribly inefficient, coming in a distant last place in the real-time portion of the test, but taking the same amount of CPU time as the others.  This may have been a anomaly in this case but was repeatable over multiple retries..  Finally in the other three tests we see the DFI board come in second (Pifast), third (Truespace), and first (OfficeBench), though in most cases it is a small difference between the motherboards here.  Overall a good result from this motherboard.

    Now for the last piece of the puzzle, the price.  This motherboard seems to have almost equal amounts in common with the Albatron 865PE Lite and the MSI 865PE Neo2-FISR.  It is a fairly basic motherboard, providing the bare essentials in most cases, like the Albatron.  However, it also has dual channel memory and four SATA connectors, like the MSI board.  The price is right between the other two motherboards compared to about $70 for the Albatron and close to $140 for the MSI board. 

Good Points

• Inexpensive 865PE

• Good Performer

• SATA RAID

• Gigabit LAN

Bad Points

• No USB or Firewire cables

• ICH5 nor ICH5R

• No Intel CSA Gigabit LAN

Bottom Line

    This is a motherboard that performs well and has most of what you need in a motherboard.  As long as you have the extra USB and Firewire cables then this motherboard is a very good choice.

If you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.

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