3D Games

    First lets look at Jedi Knight II, which is based off of the Quake III engine, which happens to be a very memory intensive program, and thus should love the extra bandwidth of the 865PE chipset.  Lets see how the MSI 865PE Neo2 does at 1024*768.

    What do these results show?  From the 845PE, which provides 109fps to the 865PE with the 2.4b processor, there is a 3.5-5% increase in frame rate.  Compared to the 2.4C on the 865PE with dual channel memory the 845PE motherboard is about 15% slower.  Here like with Pi Fast there is a difference between motherboards, as well as with memory bandwidth.  The difference can be as much as 4% with the higher bandwidth of the 2.4c processor.  Does this work the same with UT2003?

    Unreal Tournament 2003 is one of the most graphically intense games that is currently out.  As such it is a very demanding on both the video card and the CPU.  How does this new motherboard perform in this test?

    Here with UT2003 we see a progressive increase in frame rate.  The move to the 865PE yields a 3% improvement in this test, though dual channel memory adds another 2% of improvement in frame rate.  Moving to the higher FSB 2.4C processor yields a 7.5-8.5% improvement in frame rate compared to the comparison 2.4b processors.  So games seem to offer a improvement with the newer chipset even without changing the memory bandwidth to be twice as much.  How does video do with this new motherboard?

Video Rendering

    DivX is fast becoming a standard for video, and the quality level can be very good for the size.  This has allowed people to legally back up their DVD's to a smaller format.  So how does the 865PE perform in encoding video in VirtualDub 1.4.10, with DivX 5.03.

    DivX like most of the other programs that we have tested so far shows an improvement from the 865PE chipset.  This time the initial improvement is about 5% which means you get an extra fps, for your encoding of movies that could mean saving that essential time to encode your video.  Overall the improvement turns out to be 16%, going from the 845PE with a 2.4b processor to a 2.4C using dual channel memory on the 865PE chipset.  Does MPEG-2 encoding also show a similar improvement?  Lets find out.

    TMPGEnc is one of the least expensive MPEG-2, but doesn't sacrifice quality at all.  In fact it is one of the best MPEG-2 encoders I have used.  So how does this program perform with both the 845PE chipset and the newer 865PE Neo 2.

    Here we see a large boost going from the 845PE based chipset to the 865PE chipset, in the order of 19%.  After that there is little improvement to be had by moving to dual channel memory, 1% or less, which is within the error range of the test.  Moving from a 133MHz FSB CPU to a 200MHz one offers a 6% improvement, which is nice to see.  Overall a 27% improvement compared to the older 845PE chipset is very nice to see.  Now we've seen the performance of the chipset in relation to the CPU, however how does the other portions of the motherboard work, such as the network card and the IDE ports.