DFI Lanparty DK P45-T2RS PLUS

Verdict:

[+] DK

Good layout; decent price; friendly BIOS

[-] DIDDY KONG

BIOS bug at 457MHz FSB; slow multitasking score

The DFI Lanparty DK P45-T2RS PLUS features Intel’s P45 chipset, and with DFI’s pedigree in overclocking, we were keen to see just how far we could push Intel’s newest mainstream chipset. Just a quick bit of house keeping first though – this PLUS version has official support for 1,066MHz memory and eight S-ATA ports. The slightly cheaper basic model has only six S-ATA ports (no great loss) and can officially handle only 800MHz memory.

P45 has only 16 lanes of bandwidth to feed the two 16x PCI-E 2.0 graphics slots. Running one GPU will give the single card access to all 16 lanes, while running two ATI cards in CrossFire allocate each card eight lanes. SLI is not supported.

LAYOUT

Further expansion slots consist of two 1x PCI-E slots and two PCI slots. Fitting a pair of dual-slot graphics cards will still leave you with one 1x PCI-e slot and one PCI slot, which should be enough for most. The two PCI slots are placed as far away from the primary graphics slots as is possible, so if you use only hot-running graphics card, your expansion cards shouldn’t cook.

The Lanparty sports four DIMM slots which will house up to 8GB of PC2-8500 (1,066MHz) DDR2 memory. The board has one EIDE and one floppy port, with three USB headers along the bottom edge. Including the rear I/O block, you could use up to 12 USB devices with this board, though note that FireWire is missing.

The eight RAID-capable, S-ATA II ports are all mounted in line with the PCB to allow for neater cabling. Audio is taken care of by a Realtek ALC885 codec which provides 8-hannel support. The back I/O panel also holds optical and coaxial S/PDIF out, as well the usual 6 analogue surround sound ports.

PERFORMANCE

The Lanparty was fairly quick out of the box in our Gimp image editing and Handbrake video encoding benchmarks with scores of 973 and 997 respectively – a fast board should score 1,000 with our test kit. However, the DFI really let itself down in the multitasking test, with a poor score of 733. Playing Crysis at 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x AA using our BFG 512MB GeForce 8800 GTS graphics card gave us a respectable minimum of 23fps and an average of 31fps.

OVERCLOCKING

Clearly the board was begging to be overclocked, and given DFI’s pedigree, we were eager to delve into its BIOS. Applying the usual overclock of a 458MHz FSB and a vcore of 1.525V to overclock our Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 from 2.66GHz to 3.66GHz we were disappointed.

Any motherboard worth its overclocking salt should handle this overclock easily, but the DFI refused to POST with these settings. After dropping the FSB to 450MHz for a CPU speed of 3.66GHz, the board did run stably so we worked our way up from there to find the ceiling. Interestingly, the Lanparty was happy at up to 457MHz, but one more notch over this frequency was enough to stop the board from POSTing.

A stable overclock achieved, the most notable improvements in the Lanparty’s scores were in the image editing and video encoding tasks which went from a shade under 1,000 to 1,274 and 1,333 respectively. The multitasking score was boosted by over 100 points, though was still slow. Crysis also saw a boost and the board was now able to run the game at a playable minimum frame rate of 25fps, with the average going up from 31fps to 33fps.

BIOS

On the while the Lanparty’s BIOS is laid out very clearly. The FSB is displayed in its quad-pumped form, which might prove confusing however. All the voltages are displayed in their complete numbers excluding the vcore which is adjusted in increments of 25mV. Although this isn’t ideal, the stock voltage of the installed CPU is displayed underneath, making things a little easier to calculate.

CONCLUSION

At this late stage in the game for socket LGA775 motherboards, if you really need a new board, price is going to be more of a key factor than ever as you could be upgrading to Core i7’s LGA1366 socket before you know it. However, the BIOS glitch that prevents a higher FSB than 457MHz dents the appeal of this otherwise very good motherboard. There are better boards to be had in this price range though – the Biostar TPower i4 is excellent for £97.45 inc VAT as we found out in the Labs test of Issue 62 (on sale now).

You can buy the DFI Lanparty DK P45-T2RS PLUS from Scan Computers for £109.28 inc VAT (price correct at time of review)

For more information on the Lanprty DK P45-T2RS PLUS, visit DFI's website

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