Introduction:

Our previous DFI motherboard reviews here and here have convinced me of the talent of the engineers working at the DFI labs. Earlier this year, it was quite difficult to keep having faith, because DFI always manages to be a few months late when releasing their newest products, especially when a new chipset or feature is introduced.

Despite this 'always late' attitude, DFI still continues to impress me with their motherboards. Okay, their boards are not always the cheapest, neither do they have the most features on board, nor are they extra special overclocking-wise, but the combination of it all makes for unique products. From my own overclocking point-of-view, I found the P35 and P45 to be excellent, although it has to be said that there are definitely (more than) worthy alternatives on the market.

This time, DFI is back at the place where it all started, they returned to the terrain that made them world-famous ... the green grass of AMD village. We all remember the legendary Athlon XP and Athlon 64 motherboards, but before I bore you (once again) with a series of superlatives to describe my feeling about those boards, which you can find in previous articles, I'll get on with it and continue with the more interesting part of the review: having a look at the motherboard, bios, checking out the performance and of course the overclockability.

What product are we testing? A 790GX based motherboard which has gotten the DFI treatment. If you want to know more about the 790GX chipset please check out our 790GX launch article.



Specifications

CPU

# AMD® AM2+ processors: Phenom FX / Phenom / Athlon / Sempron AMD® AM2 processors: Athlon series / Sempron
# HyperTransport 3.0 (5200MT/s for AM2+) HyperTransport 1.0 (2000/1600MT/s for AM2)
# AMD OverDrive provides tuning options using the new “Advanced Clock Calibration” overclocking feature.
# Socket 940 AM2+ 65nm

Chipset

# AMD chipset - Northbridge: AMD 790GX - Southbridge: AMD SB750

System Memory

# Four 240-pin DDR2 DIMM sockets
# Supports DDR2 667/800/1066 MHz DIMMs
# Supports dual channel (128-bit wide) memory interface
# Supports up to 8GB system memory
# Supports unbuffered non-ECC x8 and x16 DIMMs

Expansion Slots

# 2 PCI Express (Gen 2) x16 slots - Hybrid CrossFireX - combination of the integrated graphics and a discrete graphics card in a PCIE slot (8-lane port). - Two graphics cards support CrossFireX; each operating at x8 (8-lane ports) bandwidth
# 1 PCI Express x1 slot
# 3 PCI slots

BIOS

# Award BIOS
# CMOS Reloaded
# CPU/DRAM overclocking
# CPU/DRAM/Chipset overvoltage
# 8Mbit SPI flash memory

Graphics

# Integrated ATI Radeon HD 3300 graphics core
# One DVI-I connector for digital LCD display
# Microsoft® DirectX 10
# Hybrid CrossFireX technology combines the onboard GPU and a discrete PCIE graphics card
# Onboard Performance cache for added performance

Box Lay-out

First things first: let's have a look at the exterior of the box.





Accessoires

1 x Pata HDD cable

1 x Floppy cable

1 x Crossfire link cable

1 x Molex to 2 x SATA connector

2 x SATA cable

I/O back panel

Set of jumpers

User manual

ABS installation guide

Driver disk

SATA raid installation disk

Motherboard





The cpu socket area is spacious enough, but then again, most new AM2+ motherboards have one.



The CPU PWM area looks quite alright.

1 mini-DIN-6 PS/2 mouse port

1 mini-DIN-6 PS/2 keyboard port

1 optical S/PDIF-out port

1 coaxial RCA S/PDIF-out port

1 IEEE 1394 port

6 USB 2.0/1.1 ports

1 RJ45 LAN port

Center/subwoofer, rear R/L and side R/L jacks

Line-in, line-out (front R/L) and mic-in jacks

2 PCI Express (Gen 2) x16 slots (Hybrid CrossFireX-ready)

1 PCI Express x1 slot

3 PCI slots

3 connectors for 6 additional external USB 2.0 ports

1 connector for an external COM port

1 connector for an external IEEE 1394 port

1 DVI connector

1 front audio connector

1 CD-in connector

1 IrDA connector

1 CIR connector

6 Serial ATA connectors

1 40-pin IDE connector

1 floppy connector

1 24-pin ATX power connector

1 8-pin 12V power connector

1 4-pin 5V/12V power connector (FDD type)

1 front panel connector

6 fan connectors

1 diagnostic LED

EZ touch switches (power switch and reset switch)

Bios: Basics








Bios: Advanced chipset configuration







This page offers you the possibility to tune the HD3300 IGP.

Bios: PC Health and CMOS Reloaded




DFI's known for the possibility to save your bios settings to different profiles; using the ABS tuning utility, you can even share your bios profiles with your friends and family.

Bios: Genie bios

Timing mode: 400/533/667/800/1066

Cpu vid special add: -800mV - +775mV (steps of 25mV)

Dram Voltage: 1.8v - 3.2v (steps of 25mV)

SB PLL 1.2v voltage: 1.2v - 1.5v (steps of 0.1v)

NB HT voltage: 1.2v - 1.55v (steps of 0.05v)

NB Core voltage: 1.15v - 1.5v (steps of 0.05v)

NB PCIE voltage: 1.1v - 1.4v (steps of 0.1v)

Side Port voltage: 1.6v - 1.9v (steps of 0.1v)

CPU Clock ratio: x4 - x24,5 (steps of 0,5x)

CPU Host/HTT clock: 200MHz - 700MHz (steps of 1MHz)

PCIE Clock: 100MHz - 250MHz (steps of 1MHz)

Bios: Genie bios: DRAM configuration



Enabling the advanced mode, the ODT control mode page becomes accessible



Bios: Genie bios: DRAM configuration: MCT Memory timing



Enabling the advanced mode will give you a lot of new tuning options



Bios: Genie bios: DRAM configuration: ODT control mode



Bios: Genie bios: HT Link control



HT Link Frequency: 200MHz - 2.6GHz (steps of 200MHZ)

Enabling the advanced mode will give you some extra options



Bios: Genie bios: CPU Feature



Enabling the advanced mode will add the possibility to change the NB multiplier, which can come in handy when you're trying to reach high HTT frequencies. The features actually work, but before you change anything, please read through Tony's guidelines on TheTechRepository in which you can find the explanation of NB fid and did values.

Test setup

Madshrimps' AMD Test Setup
CPU	AMD Phenom X4 9950
Cooling	Noctua NH-U12P
Mainboard	DFI Lanparty DK 790GX-M2RS Foxconn A7DA-S
Memory	2 * 1GB G.skill F2-8500CL5S
Other	Sapphire 4870X2 Antec 1000W PSU Western Digital 320Gb SATA HDD Windows XP SP3

Methodology

The following benchmarks were used:

Lavalys Everest: Memory latency

SuperPi 1M

Wprime 32M

Wprime 1024M

PCMark05

TechArp X264 HD benchmark

Cinebench 10

3DMark2001SE

3DMark06

Crysis

We ran both setups at 2,6 and 3,2GHz to compare. Detailed information here:

Phenom X4 9950BE - 200x13=2600Hz - 2000MHz (NB) - 400MHz 4-4-4-10 - Ganged

Phenom X4 9950BE - 200x16=3200MHz - 2000MHz (NB) - 533MHz 5-7-7-25 - Ganged

SuperPi and Wprime:

SuperPi has been around for ages now, but still reflects the performance of the technology. Being single threaded, you won't increase performance by inserting a quad core processor, but that's why we've chosen Wprime as an alternative. Wprime has been included in the HWBot benchmark suite for quite some time now and many people agree on the quality of the benchmark. Wprime works with multiple threads and is ideal to test multi-core processors.



Both boards head to head in this one.



Just a very minor difference between both setups, although you can find the DFI on top.

Lavalys Everest 4.50

We used the memory benchmark utility to measure the performance of the memory management.



Again, keeping each other in balance.



The DFI is noticeably faster, as the difference between both boards is large enough to speak about a significant difference. Using memset, we analyzed the two systems, but didn't find any setting that could explain everything.

Futuremark benchmarks

These synthetic 3D benchmarks from Futuremark allow you to evaluate the expected performance of a system with different generation games. As each 3DMark uses different feature and quality settings, it allows you to get an idea of how a video card will perform in games. But be aware that since Futuremark takes DirectX guide lines to build their stress tests with all features available, performance can differ from real world games when those games don’t fully support/implement all DX features. So take these results with a grain of salt, and always compare them to our game benchmarks.

3DMark2001SE

The 3rd product in the 3DMark line has been around for ages now and still is used by many people to measure their system's power. Over the years, the benchmark has become more a system benchmark than a pure graphics benchmark.



Dfi in the lead on this one!

3DMark06

The last of the DX9 benches in their series is still a graphics card benchmark; however, there's a place for CPU testing as well, as Futuremark developed a CPU test for this benchmark. The more cores, the merrier, so results with four cores will always be better than with two cores.



In the contrary to what we've seen in the previous tests, the Foxconn motherboard seems to be faster 3DMark06-wise.

PCMark05

PCMark05 is the last benchmark of the PCMark series which works in Windows XP and it still offers the simplicity of multiple small benchmarks in one. We've selected the most interesting subtest and put the all in one chart.



Close to not difference reported by PCMark05.

Cinebench R10

Cinebench is a benchmark that fully stresses the CPU and measures the raw power of your processing unit by rendering a high-quality image.



Even after re-testing both boards, the same numbers popped up in the 3.2G test setting.

TechArp X264 HD benchmark

This benchmark has been introduced to me by Piotke, who used it in his QX9650 review. Using multiple cores it gives us quite a decent view on how fast our setup can encode a short DVD-MPEG2 video clip into an X264 clip. We used the latest HD resolution version of the benchmark to run our tests.



Close to no difference in the encoding benchmark.

Crysis

Prey uses the venerable game engine from ID software, Tech4 it’s called now, also used for Doom 3 and Quake 4. Prey started development back in 1995, and it took 11 years to see this project come to completion, but when it finally was launched, gamers were pleased with such beautiful graphics, nice story line and original gravity puzzles.



With the help of the HardwareOC Prey benchmark utility, we tested the performance. As we know we're a bit limited when it comes to graphical power, we ran the Prey game in two different test scenarios:

- 640x480, Low detail, no AA or AF: To magnify the difference between both processors
- 1680x1050, low detail, no AA or AF: Is the difference still visible in higher resolutions?



The DFI being faster in a real gaming environment.

Overclocking: Phenom X4 9950BE

As usual, I did spend some time overclocking the motherboard, well ... the processor and the IGP to be precise. As I had my hands full with the Phenom performance scaling article, for which I used the DFI motherboard, I can only give you some of my little overclocks.

First of all, I wanted to sharpen my personal AMD SuperPi 1M record, which was at that time set at 24s flat using an Phenom X4 9850 and the Foxconn motherboard. Using my 9950BE, which is a new revision and is said to overclock a tad better, I was able to hit 3.4GHz on air cooling, using a very moderate vcore of 1,488v. Please understand that this result is not obtained during a real benching session, but during a motherboard test session, which means that the result is not optimized, nor have I reached the absolute end of this configuration.


(click to enlarge)
Hwbot - SuperPi 1M

Overclocking: HD3300 IGP

Next to the CPU, there's the integrated video card, which is also overclockable ... and if it's overclockable, we must find the highest stable frequencies! As HWbot is all about breaking records and trying to overtake your opponent to fetch every point you can get, I mainly focused on the benchmarks categories in which I wasn't first to begin with (for those who forgot, I already tested the IGP on the Foxconn motherboard).

When I previously tested the HD3300 of the A7DA-S, I noticed that the overclockability of the IGP on other motherboards, such as the Gigabyte or Biostar, seemed way better as they were able to go past 950MHz core frequency quite easily, whereas I got stuck at 750MHz. In overclocking terms, the DFI did a little better as I was able to go past 800MHz core frequency quite easily. Thanks to an elevated cpu frequency, I was able to overtake everyone in both the 3DMark05 and Aquamark3 class.


(click to enlarge)
Hwbot - 3DMark05


(click to enlarge)
Hwbot - Aquamark3

In general, I'm quite satisfied by the DFI; the many features and options give the user a wide range of tweak ability and actually quite some stuff to think about. The board acted, in my opinion, a little bit smoother and was easier to handle than the Foxconn board I tried, but that's a feeling that depends from person to person. I can imagine, though, that overclockers who are less known with the DFI bios style will be overwhelmed by the (over)crowded bios.

Evaluation

With its price of +/- 120€, it's not one of the cheaper 790GX motherboards and as the added extras and features are practically non-existent, I'd say a regular user shouldn't be choosing the DFI over any other board unless you really like the bright yellow colors. An overclocker, a tweaker more likely, will like this board very much though as nearly everything can be adjusted from the bios in detail. The performance level is decent, overall a tad faster than a reference 790GX, but in real-life applications not noticeable.

+ Bios is extremely extensive
+ Color scheme
+ Integrated videocard
- Price

Conclusive thoughts

As the Phenom II is about the hit the market, it might be good to start looking for a decent motherboard to get on the AMD-ship as soon as possible. The DFI Lanparty DK 790GX-M2RS is definitely a very decent motherboard and will give you the necessary overclocking tools to get started, but for most users the set of tools is just too big even without the advanced mode. The ABS function, which gives people the opportunity to share bios settings, might help some, although I don't think that people are that eager to use someone else's bios settings without guarantees that it’ll work. If you don’t intend to overclock, look for another 790GX motherboard that will give you more features and extras for a less money.



I'd like to thank Wendell from DFI for sending us the DFI Lanparty DK 790GX-M2RS for review.