System setup and notes
Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.- Intel Pentium 4 3.00GHz HT S478 Northwood CPU (800FSB)
- AMD Barton XP3
Common components
- ATi Radeon 9800 Pro (380/340)
- 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3500C2 run at 2-6-2-2 at DDR-400 for
Software
- Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
- DirectX9
- Intel 5.00.1012 chipset drivers
- NVIDIA nForce 2.03 drivers
- ATI CATALYST 3.2 drivers and control panel (6307s)
- Pifast v41 to 10m places
- Lame v3.91 MP3 encoding with Razor-Lame 1.15 front-end using U2's Pop album
- SiSoft SANDRA 2003 (9.4
Notes and issues
Once the BIOS was updated to the very newest version the DFI had no niggles or problems over a few days' of testing. All the devices installed correctly. The motherboard itself installed without a hitch into a standard Lian-Li PC60 case. The DFI rebooted flawlessly at each and every setting, so remarkable stability from a company that's not all that well known over here.Adding a further two Corsair XMS3500 modules, and giving us a total of 4 slots filled, forced us down to 2-6-3-2 (tRAS =3) timings. That's still pretty tight, low latency timings.
We now state the running speed of each board. This helps us to determine if overall performance is influenced by increased CPU and memory speeds. The DFI plays the FSB game very, very conservatively by running our 3.0GHz Pentium 4 C at ~ 2995MHz. Because the competitors always run on the wrong side of 3GHz, we've manually increased the FSB to 201. This gave a running speed of 3007.52MHz / 200.5FSB, which is far more in tune with the competition. So, to summarise:.
3030.2MHz - ASUS P4P800 Deluxe
3007.52 - DFI LANPARTY PRO875 Canterwood
3007.52MHz - ABIT IC7-G
2205.3MHz - EPoX 8RDA3+ (AMD Barton XP3200)
FSB Overclocking
FSB overclocking is always fun because one never knows exactly how far they'll get. It's pretty much a luck of the draw scenario. The passive heatsink should, ceterus paribus, not allow us to go as far as an actively-cooled NB. Knocking our semi-unlocked P4 down to 12x and running the memory with the 6:4 ratio, we started inching up from 200FSB.250FSB came and went without a whimper. 275FSB didn't seem to phase the board. It seemed to us that our CPU started having the odd wobble in the 290FSBs. 290FSB itself was stable (and hot). 295FSB was semi-stable. 300FSB would boot but not complete any benchmarks.
If you ever wondered what the initials DFI stood for, wonder no longer. Diamond Flower International doesn't exactly set our world on fire, so we'll stick with DFI. In terms of overclocking potential this particular sample is about as good as it gets. Imagine running a 2.4 C at 300FSB. Tasty, eh ?.