The DFI Lan Party 865PE mainboard stands out from its competitors. DFI has definitely made a board that is comparable to the 1st tier in terms of stability. In terms of overclockability, it has also show remarkable BIOS options that I would never have thought of. Not only is it an overclocker's choice, it is packed with goodies with rounded cables, transpro, frontx etc. It is the first manufacturer to bundle Transpo, for transporting your barebone system to LAN parties. Although I find the UV feature more of a decoration to the board, it might looks exceptionally impressive under UV lighting for those who love to mod their casing. There is also the FrontX for mounting configurable front panel connectors.

Based on the Intel 865PE chipset, the board supports AGP 8x, Dual Channel DDR400, Gigabit Ethernet, 6 ch audio, 2 SATA RAID ports  (+2 non RAID), IEEE 1394, USB 2.0. Most importantly, this board comes with CMOS RELOADED which allows one to set up to 4 configurable cmos settings for testing the board for overclockability or performance. The only pity is that there is no IDE RAID on board. It would be good if DFI throws in some SATA to PATA port converter so that you can RAID using the ports.

Installation was a breeze. With all the EZ buttons for Power On and Reset + Diagnostic LED, it makes it one of the better boards for your overclocking "experiments".

Overclocking wise, it has a almost everything you need. FSB can be adjusted from 100 ~ 400Mhz at 1mhz stepping. AGP can be FIX at 66. There are settings to PATCH like those like PAT on 875P. This makes the 865PE performing at 875P levels.. In our tests, we ran the P4 2.4C and overclocked it up to 3.1GHz at 260MHz using a pair of 512M Corsair TwinX 4000-1024. You can click here to find out how far we managed to get the system stable using this two sticks of RAM.

Memory Benchmarks at 260MHz CAS 3, 8-4-4 using P4 2.4C

Overall, the DFI 865PE mainboard is aimed at the crazy overclockers. It is one of the better boards not only for modders, it is also one of the good choice for gamers and overclockers.

Suggested Retail : USD178 on pricewatch.com

Discuss

Pros 好处:

• 6 Channel audio
• USB 2.0 
• 1394
• Dual LAN, 10/100Mbps Ethernet
• Vcore, Vdimm, VDD, FSB control
• CMOS Reloaded

Cons 坏处:

• Price is steep
• No IDE RAID

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.

Gold Award & Innovation Award (CMOS RELOADED)