Product Listing

DFI LANParty DK P45-T2RS PLUS (Intel P45)

By Vincent Chang - 4 Sep 2008

Overclocking & Test Setup

Overclocking

With its target audience of overclocking enthusiasts, DFI's motherboards have usually been known for their range of BIOS options. This remains the case for the DK P45-T2RS PLUS, which at times have rather too many options in our opinion. Therefore, it can be overwhelming for less experienced users, but fortunately, DFI realizes this and has two modes for the BIOS, Easy and Advanced, with the Advanced mode showing the full set of BIOS options that only overclockers are inclined to tweak.

Some of the advanced options that you will see in the 'Advanced' view of the BIOS. Press F9 to enable this.

Below are some of the more common options that are found on even mainstream motherboards nowadays and are obviously also on the DFI DK P45-T2RS PLUS:

  • FSB Settings: 200MHz to 999MHz
  • DDR2 Settings: Auto, 200/667, 200/800, 266/667, 266/800, 333/667, 333/800, 400/800
  • PCIe Settings: 100MHz to 250MHz
  • CPU Voltage Settings: +12.5mV to 787.5mV (in 12.5mV steps)
  • Memory Voltage Settings: 1.789V to 3.280V (in 0.23/0.24 steps)
  • SB Core/CPU PLL Voltage Settings: 1.55V to 2.15V (in 0.20V steps)
  • NB Core Voltage Settings: 1.1825V to 1.97V (in 0.0125V steps)
  • CPU VTT Voltage Settings: 1.210V to 1.603V (in 0.011V steps)
  • Multiplier Selection: Yes, 6 - 50 (CPU dependent)

We updated the BIOS on the DFI LANParty DK P45-T2RS PLUS to the latest D45D812 version and proceeded to test and overclock the board. As mentioned earlier, enthusiasts should have a field day going through the many settings available on this board and the handy POST LED and reset CMOS button were very useful. Our quad-core processor however only managed 465MHz for the FSB, which was similar to what we had managed for previous P45 boards, though this figure was quite far from the overclocks done and posted online by others who use dual-core processors. How stable those clocks are is a different question altogether, but from our testing on our quad-core processor, 465MHz was the most stable we achieved and is in-line with typical boards of this class.

Our attempt at overclocking topped out at around 465MHz for the FSB, which was comparable with what we got for our P45 boards. Of course, there are much higher overclocks to be found online with the proper tweaks.

Test Setup

Our previous articles on the Intel P45 chipset have involved DDR3 versions of this mainstream chipset but DFI's offering uses DDR2 memory. Hence, for our testing, we had two mostly similar test configurations, differing only in the memory. We could only get our DDR2-1066 memory to run properly at DDR2-800 (for the lack of proper memory ratios) so that was what we tested the DFI at. The following hardware configurations were used:-

  • Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 processor (3.00GHz)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 @ 7-7-20 CAS 7.0 (for DDR3 motherboards)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-1066@800 and @ 4-4-4-12 (for the DFI LANParty DK P45-T2RS PLUS)
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • MSI GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB - with ForceWare 162.18 drivers
  • Intel INF 9.0.0.1007 and AHCI 8.0.0.1039 driver set
  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (and DirectX 9.0c)

The following benchmarks will be used to determine the performance of the DFI LANParty DK P45-T2RS PLUS when compared to our previously tested Intel P45 boards:-

  • BAPco SYSmark 2004 (with Patch 2)
  • Futuremark PCMark05 (ver 120)
  • SPECviewperf 9.0
  • AquaMark3
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