Loads of mainboard makers try to follow ASUS with enabling the Performance Acceleration Technology on i865PE-based mainboards in order to compete with the largest mainboard manufacturer. As we understand now, it is hardly difficult to enable the technology on the chipsets that do not officially support it.

Albatron, ABIT and Chaintech have reportedly released new BIOS versions for their i865PE mainboards that enable certain memory performance optimizations that increase the speed dramatically. I now think that these optimizations have the same nature as Intel’s own PAT, however, since Intel denies using this brand-name when referring to its mainstream products, mainboard makers do not state the they actually enable this feature. As you probably remember, ASUS announced a week or so ago that it had enabled PAT on i865PE (see this news-story), but now the company refers to this “PAT” as the “Hyper Path” mode.

If the substance of [i865PE] optimizations implemented by mainboard makers includes the same techniques as in Intel’s PAT, it makes buying i875P instead of i865PE practically useless for end-users and especially for hardware enthusiasts.

We still have to reveal if i875P mainboards have some real advantages over the i865PE-based devices in addition to ECC support, but at this point we can conclude that mainboard makers try to do everything in order to boost performance of i865PE towards i875P level. They certainly do understand that they lower the attractiveness of i875P solutions for a lot of end-users, so, there should be a logical reason for the action. Maybe after all mainboard makers will begin to boost i875P performance substantially as well?