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Intel P55 Motherboard Roundup
[Abstract]
Introduction It's still early days yet since the launch of Intel's new mainstream Lynnfield processors and the LGA1156 motherboards that support it. So far, we have no proper sales figures from...
[Content] PCDigitalMobileGame
BIOS Settings
DFI uses the Genie BIOS but to our surprise, the version found on this P55 board is quite different from older DFI versions. For one, the layout and options of the BIOS reminded us a lot of ASUS', with sections that are very similar. Of course, the features are purely DFI, from its CMOS Reloaded (and the banks of saved profiles) to the ABS II feature. Other crucial overclocking options are as follows:
- Base Clock: 133 - 500MHz
- CPU Ratio: 9 - 22x
- Memory Ratio: Auto, 800, 1066, 1333, 1600
- CPU Voltage: 1.0 - 2.0V (in 0.0125V steps)
- Memory Voltage: 1.2 - 2.6V (in 0.02V steps)
- CPU VTT: +0.0 - +0.697V (in 0.005V steps)
- PCH Voltage: 1.05 - 1.35V (in 0.10V steps)
There's no doubt that DFI keeps to its focus on catering to the enthusiast community and from its BIOS, there are certainly many settings that should delight the overclockers. When it came to the actual overclocking however, we managed 200MHz for the base clock, which is slightly less than the 210MHz that we have gotten on other boards.
Test Setup
We have switched to Windows 7 for our motherboard testing with the newer Intel P55 chipset and this continues with the DFI. For comparison, we used selected results from our previously tested motherboards. There were some memory compatibility issues with our usual Kingston DDR3-1333 memory and the DFI was unable to boot properly with that installed. The same occurred with Patriot's DDR3-1600 memory, with both default and custom timings having issues. This problem was finally settled with a switch to G.SKILL's DDR3-1600 memory, which worked at DDR3-1333 (7-7-7-21). So beware of possible memory teething issues if you face setup or usage issues.
The test configuration used:
- Intel Core i7-870 (@2.93GHz, Intel Turbo Boost, HyperThreading enabled)
- 2 x 1GB G.SKILL DDR3-1600 (@1333, 7-7-7-21) for the DFI LANParty DK P55-T3eH9
- 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 @ 7-7-20 CAS 7.0 for the ASUS, MSI & Gigabyte boards.
- 2 x 1GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1333 @ 8-8-24 CAS 8.0 for the ECS P55H-A
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 200GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
- ASUS GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB with ForceWare 190.38 drivers
- Intel INF 9.1.0.1007 and Intel Matrix Storage manager 8.6.0.1007 driver set
- Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate
The following benchmarks were used to determine the performance of the P55 motherboards:
BAPco SYSmark 2007 (with Patch 3)
Futuremark PCMark05 (ver 120)
SPECviewperf 9.0
Futuremark 3DMark06 (ver 110)
AquaMark3
Far Cry 2
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