Conclusion
I've put this board through the normal rigorous tests that we use here at Hexus and it never flinched. I have only played briefly with the overclocking options as the test cpu isn't the best, and the undervolting made it hard to get much of an increase. However I was able to manage 150MHz front side bus with memory running 376DDR. This was stable although I have chosen not to include any overclocked benchmarks in this review.
The board itself is fast and the BIOS contains a lot of tweaks to adjust performance. DFI have also included a tool that enables you to change your speed from within Windows. Amazingly this allows a larger range of front side bus choices than you can obtain through the BIOS, up to a whopping 250MHz!!! (not neccesarily achievable)
I would like to have seen a few more features onboard such as RAID, preferably Serial ATA for future support or Firewire as more and more devices appear that can use this interface all the time. The upshot is with 6 PCI slots you can easily add extra cards to support what you require.
As with my previous experience with the PE/GE revision I am happy with the inclusion of DDR333 support. Hyper-threading I'll reserve judgement on until we get a HT enabled cpu, and can tell you all about it.
Highs
- Extremely stable.
- Voltage and overclocking tweaks in Bios
- Bundled overclocking software
- Official DDR333 Support
Lows
- Lack of raid
- 2 channel sound.
- Undervolting issues
Overall rating 7.5/10
