Mercury 815 FSX

This motherboard was also tested both as an entry-level and a high-end board

because of its support for both onboard and external graphics. As it is based on

the Intel 815E chipset, it has onboard audio and video as well as support for an

external AGP card. Again, as in the case of the Jetway J 618AF, it scored well

on the features when put in the entry-level category, but lost out when placed

in the high-end category. A notable feature is its six PCI slots, the highest

number in any of the boards that we reviewed. So you will never have a dearth of

slots for add-on cards. Interestingly, the driver CD that was given to us caused

the machine to hang repeatedly and we had to use alternate drivers for the

motherboard. Later it was clarified that this was because the board came to us

directly from the production line and the driver CDs were in beta stage. The

motherboard comes bundled with PC-Cillin antivirus.

Let’s see how the board fared on our test bench. Setting it up as an

entry-level configuration, we ran our benchmarks on the board. The result for

Business Winstone 99 that measures performance in normal day-to-day productivity

applications was well at the top. In fact, the scores for this test do not vary

much given today’s fast machines. The board performed about average in 3D Mark

2000 and VideoMark 2000, the graphics benchmarks. At an average fps of 17.65 in

Quake III Arena and average CPU usage of 5.9 percent, the board was one of the

better performers in games and audio tests.

With a high-end configuration with an external AGP card, the motherboard

could not do well with its total score being on the lower end of the group.

Though it did fine in High-end Winstone and VideoMark 2000, it could not give

good frame rates in the Indy 3D application benchmark. For 3D Winbench 2000, the

benchmark for high-end 3D graphic applications, the score was again not very

good, in fact it scored the lowest in the category. In Ejay MP3 tests, the board

took the second longest time to encode our test WAV file, which is not very

good.

A price of Rs 5,500 gets you the board with a year’s warranty. It is fair

for an entry-level machine but not good enough for a high-end configuration.