DFI LANParty PRO875 Review - DFI LANParty PRO875 Review
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Manufacturer: | DFI |
| Product: | LANParty PRO875 Canterwood Mobo |
Price: | USD$196 |
Availability: | NOW |
Reviewed By: | Jim "Justi" Miller |
Review Date: | June 2003 |
DFI LANParty PRO875 Canterwood Motherboard
BIOS FEATURES:
I'm not going to spend a boatload of time on the BIOS but there are a few things that I'd like to discuss about this LANParty's BIOS option.
Before I start with the screenies there's one thing I'd like to discuss. I had a bit of a hard time getting a "good" BIOS to run with this PRO875. The BIOS that shipped initially with the PRO875 had several issues, most notably that it completely hosed the temperature displays for the P4. DFI released a new BIOS relatively quickly but it had a problem I couldn't live with, it wouldn't overclock. It somehow locked the FSB to 200MHz and no matter what you manually set it to the system booted at 200MHz. When I brought this to DFI's attention they said they were aware of the problem and currently working on it. Five days later I was emailed a new BIOS and as far as I can tell, it is fully functional.
DFI is far from the only manufacturer to have BIOS problems as of late, but it warranted mentioning because there are end users that owned this board before the problem was resolved. There's nothing worse than ordering a board with your hard earned jack only to find out you have to wait for the manufacturer to fix what should have been straight to begin with. Props to DFI for getting it fixed quickly, jeers to DFI for releasing the product without quality checking it for functionality. OK, on with the screen shots..
Let me tell you up front (SPeeD, shuddup!) that these are guaranteed to be the worst quality bios images you've ever seen. They're good enough to get the point across and that's about it. I'll show you the screen shots and then tell you what I'm showing you. That way, you can avoid clicking if you'd like. :)
CPU Overclocking Settings:
Here we can see that the front side bus settings available in the BIOS is anywhere from 200MHz to 400MHz in one MHz increments, which isn't too shabby. For the AGP/PCI/SATA Clock you have two options, "Auto" and "66/33/100" locked. Not a lot of frills, but what more do you need really?
Voltage Adjustments:
With the voltage adjustment options we're left relatively disappointed across the board..
CPU Voltage: The CPU let's you go from default up to .350v over default which isn't that bad. On our 2.6c which is default at 1.525 that gives you up to 1.875 which is respectable. The only problem is that it's in .05v increments. Personally I like to see .025v increments to allow you more fine tuning. If my math's correct that's a 3% jump per adjustment on our 2.6c Pentium4. When you're overclocking every little bit of leeway helps and .05v is simply a little to big of a jump for my liking.
DIMM Voltage: This is pretty much a flat out disappointment. With options of only 2.6v and 2.7v you have essentially no room to play. With the smack that the Canterwood chipset puts down on your memory, seeing at least 2.8v would have been nice. Do I recommend running 2.8v on your memory? No. But that doesn't mean I don't want the right to smoke my own stuff!
AGP Voltage: Again a relative disappointment with only 1.5 and 1.6v options. Personally I've never had great luck one way or the other with altering the AGP voltage, but again, I like to have my options.
DDR Settings:
DFI handles the DDR frequency a bit differently than we've seen in other boards. Instead of showing you a divider for your memory, they show you "DDR266", "DDR320", and "DDR400". Basically this means that if your system was running at default 200MHz front side bus, your memory would be set as indicated, either 266, 320, or 400. It's a little odd but once you get used to it there's no problem.
Misc BIOS Settings:
Nothing special to note with the rest. You can see above the advanced configuration screen, the heath screen, and the BIOS entry screen. Everything you need, not much that you don't pretty much.
BENCHMARKING:
We had originally planned to showcase this LANParty PRO875 against the ABIT IC7, but with all of the debate lately over which is better, the Springdale or the Canterwood, we decided that the ABIT IS7 would make a more interesting comparison platform. Below are the system specs of both systems we'll show you in the benchmarks.
TEST SYSTEM 1:
- DFI LANParty PRO875 Motherboard (Featuring the i875 "Canterwood" Chipset)
- Intel Pentium4 2.6c CPU (w/800MHz FSB)
- Overclocked settings: 2.6c @ 3516MHz (270x13), Memory @ 3/2.
- 2x256MB Sticks of TwinMOS Dual Channel PC3200 Memory
- 60GB 7200RPM Maxtor Hard Drive
- FIC Radeon 9800 Pro Video Card (Default settings, balanced)
- Windows XP Professional SP1
- Remaining components should not have an effect on scores.
TEST SYSTEM 2:
- ABIT IS7 Motherboard (Featuring the i865PE "Springdale" Chipset)
- Intel Pentium4 2.6c CPU (w/800MHz FSB)
- Overclocked settings: 2.6c @ 3536MHz (272x13), Memory @ 5/4.
- 2x256MB Sticks of TwinMOS Dual Channel PC3200 Memory
- 60GB 7200RPM Maxtor Hard Drive
- FIC Radeon 9800 Pro Video Card (Default settings, balanced)
- Windows XP Professional SP1
- Remaining components should not have an effect on scores.
So as you can see from above, both systems are identical in every way except the motherboard they are running. The only difference when overclocked was that we were forced to run the memory 3/2 with the LANParty Canterwood when overclocked, but were able to run 5/4 memory divider on the IS7. This created a noticeable difference when overclocked. The reason we rolled forward with this considering that is simple. With the first revision of the BIOS for the LANParty we able to run this same memory at 5/4 with a 271MHz FSB. Somewhere in the act of correctly other BIOS problems DFI has made it so that this board will no longer run the memory at those aggressive settings. We felt that it was a fair comparison due to the fact that it's a BIOS problem with the specific board that keeps it from running the settings, not the chipset. We wanted to offer a true comparison of overclocked results between these two boards, and we feel we've done that. We've pushed the chip as far as we could stable with the respective boards and shown those speeds as overclocked.
SiSoft Sandra 2003 Benchmarks:
While Sandra is a synthetic benchmark application, we've found it to be a very nice platform for comparing chipsets. This will show us, on even ground, direct comparisons between the LANParty PRO875 and the ABIT IS7..
CPU Arithmetic Benchmark:
CPU Multimedia Benchmark:
So far we're seeing virtually no difference between the two boards performance, but these are CPU only tests. Let's head over to the next page and take a look at what we are expecting to be real difference making benchmarks.....
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