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DFI Infinity 975X: First Look

Best Overclocker Mainboard for Intel Conroe?

by Aleksey Razin

[ 06/15/2006 | 04:15 AM ]

Those readers who have been following the paths of the first Conroe engineering samples know that there are not that many mainboards out there that can allow you to successfully overclock these processors without any additional modifications. As a rule, the overclocking gets hindered by the limited system bus frequency and processor Vcore ranges. At Computex 2006 in Taipei you could see a lot of mainboards for Conroe: not only on x965 chipsets but also on i975X. As we saw, the mainboard manufacturers were eager to introduce new mainboards on i975X chipset that were initially designed to support the upcoming Conroe CPU and allow its efficient overclocking.

The famous Coolaler guy from XtremeSystems.org forums posted a detailed description of the DFI Infinity 975X mainboard that also supports Conroe processor. During the experiments with this platform he used Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.67GHz) CPU with B0 core stepping.

You may be puzzled by slightly unusual placement of expansion slots and power supply connectors. Some decisions made by DFI engineers deserve your constructive criticism, but it is never possible to please everyone. At this time I suggest that we pay attention to the overclocking friendly features this mainboard offers in its BIOS.

The system bus frequency may be raised up to 533MHz. It is still hard to tell how many MHz from this frequency range will be actually practical. DFI may also offer other mainboard models for Conroe with even wider frequency ranges.

The processor Vcore can be increased by 0.6V above the nominal. In fact, for the given CPU the Vcore can be raised up to 1.925V, which is quite a lot. With a Tuniq Tower 120 air cooler the CPU overclocked to 3.7GHz, which is a very remarkable result.

The Vmem can be raised up to 2.65V. Keep in mind that the nominal voltage for DDR-II is 1.8V, so this supported voltage range is also quite impressive.

The Vchipset can also be set higher: from 1.6V to 1.75V. The board supports CrossFire and even SLI if you install the modified drivers, of course. It is quite possible to become one of the new record-breaking overclocking platforms very soon. We will continue reporting the news from this front, so stay tuned!