Conclusion

You may have already guessed why our today’s DFI LANPARTY DK P55-T3eH9 mainboard review got a “sporty” title like that. A step forward is DFI BIOSecure technology that allows any user to revive their mainboard after a failed BIOS reflashing. A few months ago I would consider this option to be unnecessary luxury, like Dual BIOS by Gigabyte mainboards, but the problems I have gone through lately during BIOS reflashing procedures made me change my mind completely. I wish MSI P55-GD65 had a remedy like that, so that we could hopefully bring it back to life and complete the review. So, DFI BIOSecure is a truly unique, innovative technology, for which we should definitely thank DFI. Therefore, we are proud to give them our new Ultimate Innovation award.

A step to the left in my opinion is the transition to AMI BIOS. I am sure they must have good reasons for that and with the time we should be able to see some advantages of this change, but at this point we only got a few extra drawbacks. A jump up is the total score that DFI LANPARTY DK P55-T3eH9 mainboard gets from us.

Looking back at our today’s discussion we have to admit that we didn’t find any really serious drawbacks with DFI LANPARTY DK P55-T3eH9 mainboard. The excessively complex cooling system is not really such a big deal: the good thing is that it is not too simple. We can’t disable the speaker, but it is not vitally important. Hard to distinguish Power On and Reset buttons, but there are very few people who actually use them often. Date and time get reset during CMOS clearing, so don’t abuse this option. So what if the board doesn’t display the memory frequency correctly during overclocking neither in the BIOS, nor during system boot-up?  The CPU could be overclocked 50 MHz less than on Asus or Gigabyte mainboards, which is also a minor issue. Hard to notice and read messages about over-overclocking – not an issue: just be more careful when checking for them and adjusting the BIOS settings. Not very convenient and user-friendly software? – Don’t use it if you don’t like it.

There is not a single serious issue, but the whole bunch of minor problems, inconveniences and disadvantages combined together create one big deal - DFI LANPARTY DK P55-T3eH9. This solution is very similar to the recently reviewed ASRock and Biostar mainboards, even their prices are about the same – around $185, which is in fact quite a lot. In my opinion, the board is partially a victim of being in the LANPARTY DK series. Had it been a LANPARTY BI series solution, it could have got a simpler cooling system and a more attractive price around $140, where you are more eager to overlook certain things. At this point, however, there no real reason to decide particularly on DFI LANPARTY DK P55-T3eH9 over a similar solution from ASRock or Biostar. We could only recommend DFI LANPARTY DK P55-T3eH9 to those DFI fans, who are still under the impression from the excellent DFI LANPARTY UT and LT products.