DFI LANPARTY LGA775 Showcase: The 925X-T2 & 875P-T

DFI did an excellent job with the LANPARTY 925X-T2's BIOS.  They've incorporated all of the tools necessary to tweak performance and overclock a system, along with some additional features that make it extremely easy to experiment with different configurations...

The BIOS: LANPARTY 925X-T2 Full Of Goodness

The standard BIOS menus house all of the common tools necessary to enable, disable or tweak all of the 925X-T2's on-board peripherals. Most of these menus look just like any other motherboard that is equipped with a Phoenix / Award BIOS.  It's in the "Genie BIOS Setting" and in the "CMOS Reloaded" sections that things get really interesting though.

Overclocking Tools: LANPARTY 925X-T2 What Overclock Lock?

As we browsed through the "Genie BIOS Settings" menu, it was clear DFI had the serious overclocker in mind when they were designing this board. In the "Genie BIOS settings" section, users have the ability to set the CPU core voltage as high as 1.9 volts, in .05 volt increments. Users are also able to adjust the Front Side Bus speed from 200MHz to 380MHz (depending on what type of CPU is installed), in 1MHz increments. The Northbridge voltage can be raised up to 1.8v and the DDR2 memory voltage can be raised up to 2.5v in .1v increments.  The 925X-T2 also has the ability to unlock a lower multiplier when used in conjunction with a P4 560 of P4 550 CPU. Unfortunately, our test CPU is already unlocked so we were unable to properly test this feature.

The "CMOS Reloaded" menu is home to another very useful BIOS feature.  With CMOS Reloaded, users can store different BIOS configuration, and load them by simply selecting them from a menu.  You could have one configuration set up to underclock and undervolt your CPU to keep the system running quietly, and another set up with tweaked memory timings and an overclocked CPU for a hardcore gaming session.  With CMOS reloaded, there is no need to set each option manually.

SANDRA Max OC=272MHz

To overclock our P4 560 CPU (3.6GHz) with the DFI LANPARTY 925X-T2, we first lowered its multiplier to 14 to see just how high of an FSB we could hit with the board. To help eliminate the possibility that another component being the point of failure, we also lowered our DDR2533 memory to DDR2400 speeds and raised its voltage to 2.0v, we also raised the Northbridge voltage to 1.7v, and raised the CPU voltage by .1v as well.  In the end we were able to hit a completely stable 272MHz FSB, and increase of 72MHz, and a speed high enough to run a 1066MHz FSB P4 CPU.  To hit this speed, we had to set the PCI Express clock to "Auto", however, which meant the PCI Express NIC and video card were running out of spec.  This could cause problems under some circumstances.  With the PCIe clock locked at 100MHz, we couldn't raise the FSB any higher than 225MHz.  DFI also included a handy utility to overclock the system from within Windows.  We found the utility to work well if we raised clock speeds slowly (1MHz or 2MHz at a time).  But if we jumped right from 200MHz to 250MHz, our test system would hang.