ScienceMark 2.0, Pifast, MP3
Please remember that ASUS' P4C800-E Canterwood motherboard is running the CPU at a slightly slower speed, which will negatively impact on performance. Also remember that the comparison DFI board has been updated to a Canterwood-like BIOS. Let the benchmarks begin.
ASUS' board ekes ahead in ScienceMark 2.0's memory analysis. It's still some way behind AMD's Athlon 64 FX-53, which is also running dual-channel DDR400 memory. 4.2-4.4GB/s is the norm for well-tuned i865PE and i875P boards, however.
Latency is a little better than DFI's board, too, but way, way off what on-die memory controllers can accomplish. Removing the Northbridge out of the equation pays dividend of roughly 30ns, assuming equal RAM timings.
Look how close the two Intel boards and an AMD Athlon 64 Model 3400+, sat on a VIA K8T800 motherboard, are. 2.4GHz of Athlon 64 power, in the form of the FX-53, eats up Intel's Pentium 4 3.4GHz Extreme Edition CPU.
The boot is on the other foot for encoding into 192kbit/s MP3, though.