Inevitably because of the mATX design, some areas needed to be sacrificed and the PCI area is the place that has taken the brunt of the shrinkage. In practise this worked fine but this feature wasn't used too much because the board seemed to recover well from excessive overclocking.
An LED display shows the boot progress as well as any fault codes allowing you to determine where the fault is rather than having to decipher beep codes. Three External USB headers are also in place along with the motherboard headers which DFI have thoughtfully included a set of Smart Connectors for ease of use when installing the motherboard. There's only one option for your drive controller and this is the ICH10R as there are no other controllers on board such a JMicron etc.
There are however 6 SATA ports which is ample for a motherboard of this size. How many times have you flashed a motherboards BIOS for it to corrupt itself meaning the whole motherboard needs to be RMA'd at considerable cost to you?
The chip is protected by a clasping mechanism but is relatively easy to release should you need to. Rather than opt for a full heatpipe assembly, the NB and Mosfet coolers are separated from the Southbridge heatsink. Both the Northbridge and Southbridge coolers are aluminium which is a shame as copper is a better conductor of heat but the heatpipe connecting the Northbridge and the Mosfets is nickel plated copper ensuring heat is adequately wicked away from the most critical parts.
I'd like to think that this glue is there to prevent the nuts from coming loose but I struggled to get the nuts free and with the threads also coated in the same gunk, re-using them would be nigh on impossible.
This is very disappointing as it makes the heatsinks removal a tiresome and tricky affair which, if the screws were simply spring loaded, the whole removal procedure would be so much easier. Nice to see that unlike the other Jr. P45 T2RS for a couple of months and was very impressed with it. Id question wether or not you need a dfi matx, as most people clock the whohas out of them and the insane bios options are half the reason why they buy them.
Not something you need in a HTPC, but chioce is never a bad thing. Great review matey Quote. Yeah, those that'll make good use of the rediculously high voltage options and tweaking benefits are likely to be using high end or extreme cooling solutions and that usually means either a very large or no case at all. However, there are those that still want a top end gaming setup but for whatever reason cannot do with a large chassis sitting around. These questions and more will be answered during this review!
Also of note is a sticker on the board that proclaims the end of the infamous Intel power off when overclock settings are changed. This is great news for long time Intel enthusiasts, as the power down issue was an annoyance to most. The back of the box lists the various features of the motherboard. Ope ning the box reveals another plain white box which displays the LanParty Logo, and inside are all the provided accessories.
The following items are included in the packaging:. A Closer Look and Under the Hood. Pulling the Motherboard from the box reveals the item neatly wrapped in a static free bag.
Here are a couple of pictures of the wrapped board and an expanded view out of the bag. The next set of images provide a closeup look at all the different areas of the Motherboard. As you can see by the pictures, things are pretty tightly spaced. Given the limited space available, DFI has done an excellent job with the layout of the Motherboard.
Only a couple of issues were noticed with the layout. First was the memory retention clips closest to the video card, they can not be relieved while the video card is installed. This is nothing new and is obviously an issue related to the minimul amount of space available on both form factors. This is not a major issue and has become more common with the advent of large video cards. Second was the lack of a fan mounting option over the PWM heatsink.
If you use air cooling which is large enough to overhang the PWM area, or a cooler that has a side mount fan, this might not be an issue as you can direct a good amount of air flow over the PWM area. Because the test system will be using air cooling, the presence of air flow over the PWM, and its effectiveness will be monitored. Perhaps a wire clip option to mount one or two small 40mm fans over the PWM heatsink would be something worth exploring.
Lets touch on some of the highlights of the Motherboard. By doing this, DFI has ensured maximum contact between the heatsinks and chips, which greatly improves the cooling effeciency and performance. Under the PWM section of the heatsink assembly is a thermal pad, which was inspected for proper contact with the PWM chips. Upon removal of the heatsink assembly a large amount of thermal paste was applied to the Northbridge, perhaps too much?
The BIOS. In this section you can save up to four different profiles. As you begin to overclock the board and find settings that work well, you can simply save them and reload them at any time. A very handy feature and well thought out by DFI. Continuing to the Voltage setting sub menu you will find a wide array of available voltage settings. Below is a list of items on which voltage manipulation can be performed, and the voltage ranges available. Testing and Benchmarks.
Pros: Like stated before X58 Micro ATX motherboard, Dual x16 pci-e slots,6 Dimm slots, no onboard video, HD audio, Great for small form factor gaming, full gaming tower cases overated and to bulky for me anyways So i went micro Good job DFI!!!
Cons: My knowledge of overclocking Needed to adjust memory remapping to get it to load vista with 2 graphics cards Dimms were mislabled in manual Pros: Over all a very good board for the average consumer looking to build a fast gaming rig. Obviously a lot of features packed into a small board. Runs strong and performance is really good under Vista and Windows 7 as x Stable overclocking with lots of nooks and crannies in the BIOS for tweaking.
Easily able to overclock my i7 easily. Built in Audio is good, gigabit LAN works well. Cons: Tech support is vacant. Drivers are for consumer OS but most Vista ones work in Windows I originally purchased this to be a Virtual Machine host in Windows Yeah, a consumer board for the cheap home server environment.
I contacted Tech Support only to be ignored all 3 times spread over 2 months. I posted on monitored support forumns and they ignored my pleas as well. I am able to support multiple VMs using Hyper-V. However the Securable application common tool for checking still indicates that the BIOS is not hardware virtualization enabled, which is concerning but as long as I am functional that is good enough for now. Sold by: Newegg Shipped by Newegg. This item is currently out of stock and it may or may not be restocked.
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