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Conclusion

I'm sure you noticed the FIC Dynasty is a much more feature rich board in that it supports Gigabit LAN and SATA RAID. It should be pointed out that Gigabyte does have a board with similar features in an 865PE platform. That board is the GA-8PENXP, which has Gigabit LAN and RAID albeit IDE 133 RAID and not SATA. Unfortunately we did not receive the GA-8PENXP board for our 865PE shootout and thus our final grade will be based solely on performance. As mentioned in the outset, the price of the Dynasty reflects the extra features coming in at around $155 US; where as the Gigabytes 1000 Pro saves $40 of your hard earned dollars coming in at $115 US.

Performance wise the winning grade goes to Gigabytes GA-8IPE 1000 Pro. I doubt this is any surprise to those of you who have closely examined the benchmarks as you read through this article. While the FIC Dynasty fared well in the gaming end of things and did respectably in office productivity, the GA-8IPE 1000 Pro out scored in most of the office productivity areas and took a slight edge in gaming. Also, though we never overclocked these two boards, the BIOS features indicate the GA-8IPE 1000 Pro should fare better here. I base this on the extra Vcore allowance for the 1000 Pro and the higher possible clock frequency all of which should lead to an all 'round higher FSB.

Now to be fair to the Dynasty, it's only big loss in all the benchmarking was in the floating point area of Sisoft's Multimedia Benchmark. Other areas of the tests were all close and I get the feeling that in a multi board "Round Up" we'd see the Dynasty in the top rungs of the ladder.

PAT, Hype or not?

Now what about the 875P and PAT technology? Most boards perform in degrees of difference even with the same chipsets, but we can see in our benchmarks a clear trend toward higher performance with the 875P. This makes me feel a little better when I see essentially the same chipset given a different designation based on the performance of the MCH. It seems that chip binning the MCH really does help in over all performance of this particular Intel architecture. I suppose Intel could have labeled 875P the 865PE with Enhanced Memory Controller maybe calling it the 865EMC or something like that. While marketing sometimes dictates designations, I feel the performance potential we see in boards such as the MSI Neo lends credence to a separate designation and in the end the 875P does perform like a different chipset and a good one at that.