Mobo Tsunami! 24 Boards with the 865/875P Chipset

Intel D865PERL: Potential For Fine Tuning, Continued

Intel could exercise more care with the panel for the connections. There are no labels, so the user has to rely on color-coding. The manual should be kept at hand for the audio outputs especially. We must comment here that Intel is renowned for setting a whole series of industrial standards, but when it comes to its own boards, it makes unnecessary cutbacks.

No description on the ATX panel.

The specialty shop charges just under $160 for this board. This is already a better offer than the D875PBZ, without any accessories, for just under $200.

This is what's included with the board.

Our assessment in brief: the slowest motherboard in the entire test field costs just under $160 and offers FireWire and ICH5 RAID in addition to 5.1 sound. The comparatively low performance is caused by conservative memory timing - but this is Intel's corporate policy. To achieve retail success, quite a lot more fine tuning is required, as the chipsets offer a perfect basis. There are, at any rate, no doubts when it comes to stability.