It's been quite a while since we've seen, let alone reviewed, a DFI motherboard, as the company has found it very hard to set up a reliable distribution chain the UK. This may sound very boring and businesslike, but it's crucial if the motherboards are going to be competitively priced, properly supported and easy to buy.
This particular model belongs to the infamous Lanparty series that's designed for extreme overclockers, such as those who favour water-cooling or phase-change coolers. Water or phase-change cooling might be a good idea, if only because the board didn't support our standard CPU HSF - the Northbridge heatsink is too close to the CPU socket and gets in the way. In the end, we had to file away around 7mm from the lower left corner of the plastic fan mount of the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro to make it fit. Staying with the cooling theme, DFI bundles what it calls a Transpiper in the box. This strange assembly can be screwed into the Southbridge or VRM heatsinks in order to conduct heat out of the back of the case via a pair of extra-long heatpipes, which is a great idea.
The PCB of the Lanparty is crammed with slots, including what appears to be three 16x PCI-E slots. One of these slots has 16 PCI-E lanes, the second has four PCI-E lanes, and the third a single PCI-E lane, which means that the board supports CrossFire. Also included are eight RAID-capable S-ATA II ports, and coaxial S/PDIF inputs and outputs for the Intel HD Audio codec that resides on a separate daughterboard.
Not surprisingly, the Lanparty easily maxed out our test CPU. Thanks to a wealth of BIOS options, including the ability to overvolt its clock generator chip (the first motherboard we've ever seen with this option), the Lanparty was a superlative overclocker and happily ran with a stable FSB of 535MHz. This was achieved by boosting the CPU PLL to 2.15V, the VTT to 1.6V, the Northbridge to 1.9V and the clock generator to 3.75V.
The Lanparty is amazingly overclockable but, with so many good P35 motherboards from which to choose, it's hard to justify its incredibly steep price of £169.99. Unless you plan on performing extreme overclocking with a phase-change cooler or LN2, you don't need to buy this extortionately expensive motherboard.
Author: James Gorbold
DFI Lanparty LP UT P35-T2R