X-bit labs

DFI LANParty UT ICFX3200-T2R/G Mainboard on ATI RD600 Chipset Review (page 10)

Category: Mainboards

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 01/31/2007 | 07:47 PM ]

The Northbridge ASIC CFG page also contains a lot of interesting options. However, the memory controller settings are of primary interest to us here.

As you can see, the BIOS Setup of our mainboard allows not only managing all primary and secondary memory latencies, but also adjusting the Command Rate parameter, just like nForce 680i SLI.

But the most impressive thing we saw in the BIOS Setup of our DFI LANParty UT ICFX3200-T2R/G mainboard was the voltage management system:

First of all you notice the shocking ranges for two major voltages: processor Vcore and Vmem. Thanks to the special “additive” the processor core voltage may be increased to 1.94V and Vmem- to 3.01V. It should definitely be enough even for extreme overclocking, that should be doable on DFI LANParty UT ICFX3200-T2R/G even without the voltmodding.

The options for managing the voltage of the bus and chipset North Bridge are also worth our respect. They should help DFI LANParty UT ICFX3200-T2R/G cope well with the processor overclocking by raising the bus frequency.

GTL Ref Volt options for all processor cores and chipset North Bridge are a unique feature of our mainboard’s BIOS Setup. Adjusting these bytes allows finer tuning the recognition of the logical signal levels at the input buffers of the processor cores and chipset North Bridge during overclocking. The practical experiments showed that processor overclocking by raising the bus frequency benefits from the increase in the corresponding parameters.

Of course, the mainboard also allows reducing the processor clock frequency multiplier and offers options for management of the power-saving and virtualization technologies.

The overclocking-friendly features of the DFI LANParty UT ICFX3200-T2R/G BIOS Setup are so rich that we could keep on discussing them for a long time. However, I suggest that we should take a break and check out other BIOS Setup options as well. I don’t think we need to dwell on the standard set of sections with traditional parameters. However, there is such unique technology as CMOS Reloaded that definitely deserves a separate word.

This technology allows saving a set of BIOS Setup settings in the mainboard Flash-memory and then restoring these settings upon request. DFI LANParty UT ICFX3200-T2R/G allows saving up to 4 profiles like that. There is the whole separate section devoted to CMOS Reloaded management.