Product Listing

The Tiny Giant - DFI LanParty MI P55-T36 (Intel P55)

By Vincent Chang - 21 Feb 2010

BIOS Settings & Test Setup

BIOS Settings

DFI has injected its BIOS DNA into this board, which has some of the firm's usual features like saving your BIOS settings in profiles and allowing users to define two sets of base clock frequencies - one for system boot up and the other when the OS starts. This means one could test for higher clocks during overclocking without fear that your system will fail to boot up successfully (requiring you to reset the BIOS).

DFI's ABS II also helps to automatically overclock your processor by a decent if not exciting amount. At least it works rather well due to its conservative overclock and it's practically free overclocking without requiring any effort from the user.

In short, this DFI board may come in a mini-ITX form factor but it's about as capable as any of DFI's full-sized boards in terms of what's available in the BIOS. Besides those features, some of the more relevant BIOS settings are listed below:

  • Base Clock: 133 to 500MHz
  • CPU Ratio: 9 to 22x
  • Memory Clock: Auto, 800, 1066, 1333, 1600MHz DDR
  • CPU Voltage: 1.0 to 2.0V (0.025V steps)
  • Memory Voltage: 1.2 to 2.6V (in 0.02V steps)
  • CPU VTT: +0.00 to +0.697V (in 0.005V steps)
  • PCH Voltage: 1.05V, 1.15V, 1.25V, 1.35V

The average Intel P55 board we tested for overclocking could reach 200MHz, with 210MHz quite common among the top vendors. The DFI here managed 200MHz, which puts it quite close. It certainly doesn't appear to be handicapped in any way by its form factor.

Test Setup

Our previous reviews and results were once again brought out for this review of the DFI LanParty MI P55-T36. There are some variations in memory timings, due to incompatibility, which resulted in the various different memory configurations below:

  • Intel Core i7-870 (@2.93GHz, Intel Turbo Boost, HyperThreading enabled)
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 @ 7-7-20 CAS 7.0 for the ASUS, DFI, Jetway MSI & Gigabyte boards.
  • 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 @ 8-8-24 CAS 8.0 for the ECS P55H-A
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
  • ASUS GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB with ForceWare 190.38 drivers
  • Intel INF 9.1.0.1007 and Intel Matrix Storage manager 8.6.0.1007 driver set
  • Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate


The following benchmarks were used to determine the performance of the P55 motherboards:

  • BAPco SYSmark 2007 (ver 1.05)
  • Futuremark PCMark05 (ver 120)
  • SPECviewperf 9.0
  • Futuremark 3DMark Vantage
  • AquaMark3
  • Far Cry 2
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8.0
  • Performance 8
  • Features 7.5
  • Value 7.5
The Good
No major loss in functionality despite the smaller form factor
The first mini-ITX board based on the Intel P55 chipset
The Bad
Motherboard could be prone to overheating issues from the cramped layout
More expensive than competing microATX boards
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