Introduction:



We all know DFI as the enthusiast-minded company that always tries to get the most out of their boards, overclocking-wise of course. By combining stable PWM areas and an insane amount of bios options, you define yourself working with an overclockers' dream. Over the years, Madshrimps reviewers have been using many, many DFI motherboards, such as the nForce2 Lanparty, nForce3, nForce4 Lanparty and several LGA775 motherboards.

To be completely honest, not all Dfi motherboards rock that much, no, it depends on how much time their main motherboard engineer, Oscar Wu, has been able to spend on designing and fine-tuning the motherboard. In some cases the result is excellent, in other cases, the result is not that good. As we've seen, the P35 Lanparty was a big success, hitting over 600FSB quite easily, whereas the X38 was a very hard to tune chipset over 550FSB. At the moment, my colleague reviewer Thorgal is testing the DFI X48 Lanparty and as far as I can see, it's not a walk in the park, I was able to finish this review in a few weeks, Thorgal has been hard at work fine-tuning the X48 for more than a month now.

So, what can we expect from this P45, which is more mainstream than the X48? Is it as its little brother, the P35, a success hit, or is it like its bigger brother, the X48, a hard-to-fine-tune motherboard?

In this review, we will compare DFI's version of the P45 chipset with the Asus Maximus II Formula and MSI P45 Platinum we reviewed earlier. Furthermore, we'll be spending time on overclocking this motherboard with extraordinary cooling techniques ... well, LN2.