DFI UT LANPARTY P35-T2R

Josh Collins finds out if it’s a frag fest or a lag fest.

During the AMD Athlon64 golden era of the times gone yonder, DFI was undeniably the king of the hill, with consistently strong performance across the board. From its Micro-ATX RS482 through to the legendary NF4 based SLI-DR II Expert.

DFI invested heavily in their R&D and support of the A64 platform whilst giving little attention to Intel. Unfortunately for DFI, with the enthusiast switch to Intel when the Core micro-architecture dropped upon us, DFI appeared to be left high and dry. With a lack lustre 975X based board, an NVIDIA 590 based LANPARTY platform that never made it to market after months of engineering, design and anticipation and an extremely late to market P965 and 680i based boards, it’s undeniably been a rocky ride for DFI in the enthusiast Intel sector in recent times.

With a slightly delayed release of their P35-based offering, though nothing compared to that seen with their Infinity P965 release, the LANPARTY series P35-T2R appears to be a return to former glory following on from the growth in performance and stability found in their P965 board.

Featuring stand out contrasting colours as we would come to expect from a LANPARTY series board, you’ll either love it or hate it – we quite like the unique colour choice.

The layout, as many enthusiasts have come to expect from DFI, is top notch. With consideration taken for the placement of the CMOS clear jumper, two onboard switches to control power and reset, eight right-angled SATA ports and digital PWMs around the socket area giving great insulation for extreme cooling.

Booting the system and entering the BIOS, you’d be excused for needing to change your pants. Depending on your experience and background with BIOS tweaking, you’ll either wet yourself with intimidation or feel as if you’ve experienced love at first site – perhaps even prematurely.

The P35-T2R has a very well featured BIOS with every and any discernable setting, voltage adjustment or tweak made available for your inevitable trial and error as you test for the best settings to hit the desired overclock. We found the BIOS to be a pleasure to work with and a welcome competitor to the market.

Moving onto the results obtained during testing, as has been our standard in recent months, we moved straight into testing with a 333MHz FSB and a multiplier of 9, all paired with a memory divider of 2:3, thereby ensuring the memory is running at DDR2-1000 and with manually set 4-4-4-10 alpha timings.
The DFI is very quick when set to the same settings, and compared to boards from other brands such as GIGABYTE.

This can be attributed to tighter chipset latencies and tighter default/stock secondary timings enforced on the memory if set to ‘auto’ – this also means though that there is the chance for more tweaking for a stable system. Of the benchmarks tested, the most notable gain over competitors was found in the Super Pi 4M result.

Next we increased the system’s front side bus to 500MHz and lowered the multiplier to six. Running on a 1:1 divider, the memory was effectively operating at DDR2-1000 with alpha timings of 4-4-4-10.

The results speak for themselves with the increased FSB feeding the sub-systems more aggressively.

Pushing onwards, we went in search of the maximum FSB attainable using the DFI P35-T2R.

In the end, the system topped out on a bench-stable 550MHz FSB with the memory sporting a frequency of DDR2-1100 at 4-4-4-10 latencies.

The cooling of this motherboard is also interesting, with the inclusion of an additional heatpipe and fin-array that can be screwed into place, extending from either the south bridge or the MOSFET cooling block near the rear I/O panel.

Considering DFI’s recent patchy past and their inability to either bring a board to market within a reasonable time frame, or creating a board that is below the par (P965 release excluded), the P35-T2R is a marked improvement. Dare we say it is a return to DFI fame, albeit on the Intel platform?
It was a positive experience to have the DFI offering on the atomic labs test bench and we look forward to their X38 offering expected to be released soon.