Thanx to DFI for a KILLER Birthday Present!

Lonely Raven said:

Yeah, so I thought when I started. But try putting in 10-12
hours a day fixing other peoples computers, then coming home
and having to muck with DFI's flaky BIOS and having to reinstall
Windows 3 times a night. It's not always fun.

The end result is a free motherboard, but man, I sure pay for it! LOL

Click to expand...

LOL... Yea, I could see how that would get old! How often do you get new products???

Well recently they've been putting out a new motherboard
every month or so, but I'm sure things are slowing down.
So for the past 5 months I've gotten a motherboard a month.
Not including the ones I bought for myself too! I liked the
NF II Lan Party so much I bought an extra one after testing one.
Plus the original 875Pro that I bought back the day it was
released for $220!! Damn!!

That is a good point you make on the cost vs performance (FSB) curve. You said in one of your posts that you had some heat issues? Are you currently just using stock cooling?

No, just some coolermaster HSF that I bought because I thought
it was pretty.

Honestly, I didn't think heat would be an issue, because I've
never gotten any of my processors this high yet! LOL

I am anxious to hear more about what you are able to squeeze out of that board. Please let us know and post your results.

245FSB 1:1 (Buffalo PC4300, one stick is keeping me from booting any higher 1:1 than 245).
301FSB (5:4, 3.615Ghz, 241Mhz true ram clock).

Im using a 2.4C, and I think I will agree with Raven about his theory on the little differences in teh 2.4 and some of the faster ones...I can easily get my Buffalo PC3200 (8-3-3-2.5 2.7v default @ 200FSB) to do 225FSB @ 8-3-3-2.5 2.8v. So basically it allows me to get to 225 @ default timings...none of the AMD boards ever accomplished this. Not at stock timings anyway heh.

PC4300 is Hynix (Buffalo Tech), and PC3200 is Winbond CH-5 (Buffalo Tech).

The only real complaint I have about this board is the vdimm only goes to 2.9v. But after playing with it a lot, I realized (and im not mr Intel so I dont have that much experience with P4's, but I'm getting good!) that I really dont need 3.3v (the new NF2 Lanparty B and Infinity boards) for my memory.

having been ill for a whole week, I have received a lot of new boards, and have not had time to fully crank them all up (its tough and time consuming to try and overclock 4 machines all at once!).

I agree the voltages are much more stable, though my 3.3v is still very low for some reason, no matter what PSU i plug into it. Never been an issue on any overclocking though, so maybe the diode is reporting incorrectly.

The CMOS Reloaded feature rules. Biased I am, but it still rules. when I overclock too far, I just hold the INS key down, and it boots to the BIOS at default 2.4 speeds, then I can either load my last known good overclock, or start from scratch defaults. Only downside is it only has two save slots (the NF2 B LP and Infinity have 4). No biggie though, as holding INS brings it to default boot, so I can use both Reloaded slots to hold overclock settings.

I've damn near dropped the I875A (original P4 LanParty) out the window to see if I could bust it up, but nothing we ever threw at it phased it. Only problem I ever had was Kingston's crappy HyperX PC3500 that would NEVER do above 217 =(. I never encountered any BIOS problems, no matter what I tried to make the board do. My only real complaint about the A revision of the I875 LanParty was a weak 2.7vdimm voltage. Other than that, it easily holds its own against the B (3.565Ghz was our best clock on it, at a ratio of course). I'm pretty sure that once I get more time, and figure out which stick of this Buffalo PC4300 is killing me, or I get some GEIL Platinum 4200, I will be able to 1:1 @ about 270...

DFI I875B LanParty
Buffalo PC4300 Hynix
SLK-947 w/Enermax 92mm adjustable
Intel 2.4C
WD Raptor SATA
Radeon 9700Pro
SB Audigy
MSI Dragonwriter CDRW
Chieftech case w/420watt PSU

Raven is also correct, he doesn't really get the boards for free. Like me, he has to put in many hours with a board to be able to give feedback, as I feel he is like me and won't just say what he wants or what DFI wants to hear. I'm glad we have independent testers out there like him to help us find faults or issues with the boards. He's one more helper in making our boards better each time around =)

Raven: HH in Taiwan gave me a new beta BIOS for the B I875...have they sent it to you to test out yet?

Travis

I ditched my Kingston Hyper-X too, but it turned out to be a
mistake.

The guy I sold it to has a motherboard with better voltage then
the original Lan Party and he got the PC-3500 up to 228FSB!!!!

Man I want that memory back with this new motherboard!!

I'm still looking for some good memory to drop in here.

GEIL Platinum PC4200 ($155 @ newegg 2x256)

Buffalo PC3700 BH-5
Buffalo PC3200 can do 225 easily as I mentioned above, Im pretty sure it will go higher as Epox 8RDA+ users (among others) are able to coax 240's out of it
TwinMOS PC3700 BH-5 / Twister TMD
OCZ 4000

I loved my HyperX PC2700 but hated the PC3500...even on the NF2 LP "B" board with major voltage, it still will not do one single megahertz over 217 default...

Yeah, but I need 233FSB with CAS 2.0

That's the key to performance with the P4c series.

If I can track down a pair of memory like that, I'll show you guys
benchmarks like you've never seen before!

Raven, I have tested and tested and there is no noticeable difference in CAS latency vs performance, not when you are up past 250FSB. Negligible, and between benches, hardly a gap.

Ive run at CAS2, and CAS2.5, and CAS3, and there just isn't enough of a performance difference (a couple percentage points at best, damn near even at worst) to justify spending the extra $200 or whatever to get CAS2.

I don't agree at all. I can pull a full 1500 3dmark 2001 with a
5:4 ratio better then when I'm running ADATA 8-3-3 CAS 3.0
at 275FSB 1:1

Every game and every benchmark seems to agree with that.
I'll take 275-285FSB 5:4 ratio and low latency memory any day!

Angry_Games said:

Raven, I have tested and tested and there is no noticeable difference in CAS latency vs performance, not when you are up past 250FSB. Negligible, and between benches, hardly a gap.

Ive run at CAS2, and CAS2.5, and CAS3, and there just isn't enough of a performance difference (a couple percentage points at best, damn near even at worst) to justify spending the extra $200 or whatever to get CAS2.

Click to expand...

CAS-to-RAS Delay has more of an impact in memory performance on i875 boards then CAS Latency. Keeping your tRCD at 2 and raising your CAS Latency to 2.5 will benefit you more then raising your tRCD to 3 and keeping a CAS Latency of 2.0. Running 2.5-4-4 or 3-4-4 shouldn't have nearly a significance as keeping RAS-CAS at 3.

YOu know, now that you mention it, every time I'm able to set
CAS to 2.0, the rest of the settings just fall into place. I guess I'm
just using that as a reference, but I'm pretty sure I agree with
you Speed.

I'd like to get one of the DFI LAN Party Pro 875B boards but I’m not sure that it'd be the best selection for my application. Here are other boards I’m tossing around.
Abit IC7-G
P4C800-E DELUXE
Abit IC7-Max3

The only other thing I have picked for sure is the P4 2.6GHz 800FSB CPU. I was thinking about going with the ATI Radeon 9800PRO video card but for the price I might go with a step down Radeon Pro card. I'd like to get ~3.2GHz out of the 2.6 but know very little about OCing. Would this be a pretty stable OC on one of these boards and not jeopardize the integrity of the components? The computer will be mostly used for the Horizons game that is due out the 9th of Dec. This is what is leading me to think I don’t need to spring for the 9800PRO because the game isn’t as graphic intensive as some of the other types of current games. Thanks in advance for any input.

Why are you retiring such killer boards? What are they not
doing for you? Especially if your not an overclocker!?!?

As for getting 3.2Ghz, I think it's pretty easy if you get a good
chip. But I think I might just have had pretty good luck with chips
or something, because out of 7 chips, all of them hit 250FSB
easy!

So I'd have to get the 2.6 to 250MHz FSB to hit 3.2GHz? Like I said I'm a complete noob to the overclocking thing.

The 2.6c processor has a multiplier of 13X

So 250X13=3250

I think you can do it!

But you still haven't said why you retired such nice boards.
Why weren't they good enough for you?

Not really retired "such nice" boards. The last two I just kind of was in Fry's electronics and purchased something that seemed better than what I had at home. But now that I'm looking into things a little more to find out what’s good and what’s not I am getting a better understanding about it. This current computer is a p4 2.53Ghz. It just doesn’t seem that good to me. Have a lot of problems with hanging up with a few different things. The Cd writer has been acting weird lately. I don’t know if it is just me or it really is the system, but it seems slow. Starting xp it takes 15 passes of the waiting bar until it boots. Not sure if that is slow or not but it seems a little on the slow side. Accessing IE is slow at times. When I open explorer to look at files it is slow a lot of the time. I click on the folder and it waits to show the contents. Just little things like that. I was asking someone earlier about my HD. The one that has the OS is old, 66ATA so I figured that might be a big problem but a guy I talked to earlier said that wouldn't be THAT much of a problem. I still don’t know if that is completely correct. I have downloaded a bunch of programs to test my computer but don’t know if my scores are decent for what I have or something is up with all the items I have. Again maybe it is just me expecting more out of the system. For example loading Matlab6.5 at school it just pops right up pretty quickly. Mine takes much longer. I KNOW my computer should be much better than the ones at school but…it’s not. Sorry for such a long post.

Well, honestly I don't feel someone should be stressing about
how long their computer takes to start up!! I honestly don't
get that. I leave mine on 24/7 and only reboot maybe once a
week if I remember to, or if I add new hardware or updates that
require me to reboot.

If your hard drive is ATA66, then it's a bit out-dated. I would
try a fresh install of Windows 2000 or XP (whichever you prefer)
on a good 8MB Cache, 7200RPM hard drive and see if that
pleases you.

No offence intended, but all the rest of the issues could simply be
user error, bad installs, old hardware, improperly maintained
windows install, or as you said, just an old install that should be
refreshed.

A computer is much like a car, and we are talking about performance
computers, so we should think of performance cars. If you took
a great car, say a Porsche for example and loaded it up with
all the best breaks, suspension, engine, and whatever else,
but you never changed the oil, no matter how much quality is
in the equipment, you're not going to perform up to it's optimum.

Also, the amound of software you load and let run on your
machine also effects your system performance. If you let spyware
and even innocous software such as Office, Anti-Virus, Kazaa,
whatever else bog down your machine, it's like taking that
Porsche and loading it with bricks. Sure the machine can handle
the load, but it's not going to be as snappy and fast if you load
it down with crap.

Again, with the Porsche analogy, going back to your hard drive.
You have a Porsche, you have a 400HP dual turbo engine, but
you put cheap gas in it (old hard drive) then it's not going to
perform up to the machines capabilitys, because it's only as
good as it's weakest part.

Sorry if that all sounds geeky, I often refer to computers as
performace cars because it's something almost anyone can
understand (barring *most* women, LOL). When you break the
idea to the simplest concept, people tend to realize and respect
the importance of things that seemed small and unimportant
previously.

I bought one last weekend and am in love with it, got to say the orange and green slots did not impress me but the board (Rev B only) kicks butt!
I have yet to fully test all its features but I am interested in testing the onboard video capture device
Edit: paid 199$ at Fry’s and it came with reactive orange cables *nice with my blue UV* Added a Radeon 8500 and of course an SL6wk Costa Rica 3.0GHz P4, haven't OCed it yet but I am out of the stuff for my Corsair water cooler so i am waiting on that to get here, once that is here I can remove this all copper Cooler Master fan on it and OC it. It is running Corsair PC3200 2x512 but I want to get two more to run 2GB in this thing for Maya and Poser.

I am impressed with this board so far!
Knowles Tech