Pricing

The D865PERL comes in three flavours, the cheapest, which has no onboard Ethernet, and no RAID on the SATA channels, and costs £90. The next up costs around £110, and includes 100Mb Ethernet, and SATA RAID. The most expensive version, which is the one I reviewed, costs about £120, and includes the Gigabit Ethernet.

Conclusion

The D865PERL is a very competent board, and is surprisingly cheap for an Intel product. The complete lack of overclocking options means this is not a board for the overclocker, but for a high end workstation, this board is ideal. Although it is sold as a desktop board, it also has great potential for a low/medium end server. SATA Raid, Hyper-Threading, Gigabit Ethernet, and Intels solid build quality could potentially form the heart of a very cost effective file server, game server, domain controller, anything really. Whether this is the board for you boils down to whether you see the "Intel Inside" logo as an assurance of quality, or whether it makes you back away and hide behind the nearest Athlon.

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