DFI's back with the new A3 revision of Intel's P45 chipset. Newer revision proabably fixes some erratas in earlier version silicons. Should provide a boost in overclocking headroom too!
New P45 range comes with a holographic design. Fancy.
Inside: Lots of UV reactive cables. Manuals. I/O shield. Xfire cable. And "Smart Connectors" for USB headers and front panel connectors (Just like those found with Asus boards).
Top view: Full solid capacitors, 2 x PCI-E slots supporting Crossfire
Rear I/O: Standard affair for DK series. Extra bios reset jumper located here for easy access. No firewire on this motherboard though.
Onboard diagnostics LED for easy troubleshooting
PC speaker is built it. Doesn't really make much noise though
PLUS board gets 2 extra SATA ports
Heatpipe cooling for NB and PWM
Orange ram slots clocks rams better.
Marvell Yukon PCI-Express based Gigabit Ethernet controller. Should leave older PCI based controllers in the dust.
Realtek ALC885 HD Audio Codec. One of the better codecs from Realtek.
SNR is on par with ALC889A and better than ALC888/883. (But I suppose overall quality still has to depend on implementation)
4 phase power with 4 mosfets each. Total of 16 digital mosfets.
Stability should be on par with 5 phase systems with 3 mosfets each.
Fully padded CPU socket for better stability.
Extra SATA ports provided by JMicron's PCI-E based JMB363.
Testing
Pretty easy to hit 600FSB with this motherboard
Might be capable of more but I'm limited by my processor and rams
Bios Settings
In case any one needs a reference, here are my OC settings that got me 600FSB
Standard bios page
Press F9 for some nice extra tweaks
CPU Clock0 and Clock1 skew might need 100-200ps adjustments at high FSB
Disable everything except multicore processing
Disable T2 dispatch. Under clock setting fine delay there's CH1, CH2 and RCOMP model settings. Try 0-0-2 or 3-3-1 models if you plan to overclock your rams high. Seems to work better.
Lastly. Tweaks for CPU/NB GTL ref voltage that gave me best results.
ABS
DFI's new Auto Boost System is available on this motherboard.
Pressing F1 during bootup increases the Vcore of the processor and pushes the base FSB to the next level
200FSB processors get a 33% boost to 266FSB
266FSB processors get a 25% boost to 333FSB
333FSB processors get a 20% boost to 400FSB
There's also a choice to download preset overclocking profiles from DFI I think but I haven't had a chance to try that
Conclusion
Pros:
+ Good layout/components
+ UV cables are pretty unique
+ 600+FSB with some tweaking
+ ABS system can give a quick and simple boost for mainstream users
Cons:
- Bios takes a while to initialise during bootup
- Aluminum Heatink for NB and PWM area
- Huge pile of white goop under NB heatsink
- Bios isn't the easiest to use
Its nice to see DFI bring out the latest A3 revision of the P45 chipset so quickly. The board does 600FSB and upwards pretty easily. Even though this is a no frills mainstream board, DFI manages to pack in a nice selection of components.
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what a bunch of lame admins
Last edited by bryanwumf : 31-07-2008 at 04:01 AM.
btw bryan this u buy de or on9 get review, n i wanna ask, this board is brown or black, i see on websites its brown lei dat made me dun wan to get PLUS, if plus is better and for 10 mere dollars more im getting this lol..
Processor Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 @ 3.49GHz (Cooled by Xigmatek Red Scorpion-S1283)
Mainboard DFI LANParty DK P45-T2RS PLUS
Graphics Card PowerColor HD 4850 @ 625/993MHz
Memory Team Group Xtreem Dark DDR2 800MHz (2x2GB) @ 4-4-4-12
btw bryan this u buy de or on9 get review, n i wanna ask, this board is brown or black, i see on websites its brown lei dat made me dun wan to get PLUS, if plus is better and for 10 mere dollars more im getting this lol..
borrow for testing only.. me more gian DDR3 motherboards.. hehe..
the PCB is black.. but i think you might see it as brownish due to the colour of the traces.. those are brown.. but this is pretty common on black pcb motherboards..
For those newbie that doesn't o/c, it's a good implementation whereby you get FREE performance by just pressing the F1 button.
For those hardcore o/c-ers, they will find this board to have a lot of o/c headroom. I really can't believe the power of Oskar.He was able to hit 640fsb ( click on my SIG ). As this is just the beginning, I believe he'd be improving the bios to gain greater FSB.
Channels
TECH GUIDES
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