BIOS

DFI’s mainboards enjoy their high popularity not only due to their thought-through design, but also to their settings-rich BIOS that gives an overclocker a lot of options. Let’s see what the Infinity 975X/G can offer in this area.

The mainboard’s BIOS is based on Phoenix’ standard AwardBIOS 6.00PG microcode, but contains rather interesting options deep inside. Most of them are available in the Genie BIOS Setting section which is a kind of Control Center for all your overclocking activities.

Take note that our screenshots show one of the latest BIOS versions for this mainboard, dated December 1, so they differ greatly from screenshots you can see in other reviews of the same mainboard. DFI has changed the interface of the BIOS Setup, making it much more comprehensible.

The picture shows that there are not so many parameters here, yet everything necessary for overclocking is present:

• FSB frequency can be increased to 533MHz stepping 1 MHz
• PCI Express frequency can be varied from 100 to 200MHz stepping 1MHz
• CPU voltage can be increased from the default value to 0.7875V stepping 12.5 millivolts
• Memory voltage is selected within a range of 1.9-2.65V stepping 0.05V
• North Bridge voltage can be set at 1.6, 1.65, 1.7 or 1.75V
• CPU VTT voltage can be increased from 1.2V to 1.25, 1.3 or 1.35V

That’s a sufficient selection of settings. The upper limits of voltages on the CPU and memory are very high, but the upper limit for voltage on the chipset’s North Bridge is rather low and this is going to be the main obstacle to your overclocking attempts with some CPUs. Well, we can understand DFI’s engineers here: the Infinity 975X/G has a too simple cooling solution on the chipset’s main piece. And if you are into extreme overclocking, you can improve the chipset’s cooling and modify the mainboard itself to increase the necessary voltage.

As for the memory subsystem options, the DFI Infinity 975X/G offers much more of them than regular i975X-based products – DFI’s mainboards have always featured enhanced memory configuring opportunities. However, the reviewed mainboard isn’t quite up to our expectations in terms of memory overclocking. It offers too few devisors to set the memory frequency.

For example, ASUS’ mainboards based on the same i975X chipset offer 3:4, 5:3 and 2:1 divisors (FSB:DRAM) besides the standard divisors of 4:3, 1:1, 5:4 and 3:2. DFI Infinity 975X/G doesn’t offer them.

The hardware monitoring page looks normal. You can monitor your system’s thermal and electrical parameters and choose the dependence between the temperature and the speed of the fans.

The reviewed mainboard not belonging to the LanParty UT series, its BIOS Setup lacks a CMOS Reloaded section typical of other products from DFI.