LAN Party Potential - DFI BI 785G-M35 (AMD 785G)

BIOS Settings & Test Setup

BIOS Settings

DFI has brought over its Genie BIOS to this mainstream board, which means that the BIOS settings are more thorough and detailed than most of its competitors. The CMOS Reloaded feature for instance, gives users more saves for BIOS profiles, so they can experiment with different settings in order to get the best overclock. Of course, even with Advanced Clock Calibration on the 785G, we're not expecting most 785G users to be actively overclocking their systems.

As before, we pushed the integrated graphics chip beyond its default 500MHz clock speed on the DFI but it could only manage 650MHz, which was lower than expected. Nevertheless, one should get a decent amount of CPU overclocking with the ABS II system on this board to compensate.

Some of the more important BIOS settings:

• CPU Frequency: 200 - 700MHz
• CPU Ratio: x4 - x15 (0.15x steps)
• PCIe Frequency: 100 - 250MHz
• GPU Core Clock: 150 - 1000MHz
• Memory Ratio: DDR3-800, 1066, 1333, 1600
• CPU Voltage: +25mV to +775mV (25mV steps), -25mV to -800mV (25mV steps)
• Memory Voltage: 1.50 - 2.493V (0.022V steps)
• NB Core Voltage: 1.15 - 1.5V (0.05V steps)
• NB HT Voltage: 1.20 - 1.55V (0.05V steps)

Test Setup

Following the same system setup as our older AMD 785G motherboard reviews, we equipped the DFI LANParty BI 785G-M35 with an AMD Athlon II X2 250 processor (3.0GHz) and 2GB of Kingston HyperX DDR3 memory as this is a socket AM3 board. Take note that the memory settings on the comparison boards were varied due to memory compatibilities at the time of their testing in previous reviews. The full configuration is as follows:

• AMD Athlon II X2 250 (3.0GHz)
• 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333, 7-7-7-20 (MSI 785GM-E51 and DFI LANParty BI 785G-M35)
• 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 @ 1066, 7-7-7-20 (ECS A785GM-M)
• 2 x 1GB Patriot DDR3-1866 @ 1333, 7-7-7-20 (ASUS M4A785TD-M EVO)
• 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2-800 @ 5-5-5-16 (Gigabyte GA-MA785GPM-UD2H)
• Integrated GPU Memory size set to 256MB
• AMD SB Driver version 8.631 and Catalyst driver 8.631 for AMD 785G motherboards
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
• LG GGW-H20L Super Multi Blue Blu-ray Disc Rewriter & HD DVD-ROM
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (and DirectX 9.0c)
• CyberLink Power DVD Ultra version 8.0.2021.50

The following benchmarks were used to test the AMD 785G motherboards here:

• BAPco SYSmark 2007 (with Patch 3)
• Futuremark PCMark05 (ver 120)
• SPECviewperf 9.0
• Futuremark 3DMark06 (ver 110)
• AquaMark3
• Unreal Tournament 3 (Ver 1.1)
• Quake 4 (ver 1.3)