915 Motherboard Roundup: Socket 775 for the Rest of Us

DFI LANParty UT 915P-T12: Overclocking and Stress Testing

FSB Overclocking Results

Front Side Bus Overclocking Testbed
Processor:	Pentium 4 Prescott LGA 775 560 ES (2.8GHz-3.6GHz)
CPU Voltage:	1.425V (1.3875V default)
Cooling:	Thermaltake Jungle 502
Power Supply:	OCZ Power Stream 520
Maximum CPU OverClock:	225 x 18 (4050MHz) +13%
Maximum FSB OC:	273FSB x 14 (+37%) SATA

Like Asus and Abit, DFI manipulates the PCIe frequency during boot to achieve higher overclocks. The DFI was able to reach a FSB of 273, a 37% FSB overclock, with an ATI X800 XT and SATA hard drive. This is the second highest overclock that we achieved with this hardware in the roundup and is very close to the results achieved with the Asus. Similarly, we reached 225x18 at the stock multiplier, which is close to the record set by the Asus P5AD2 Premium.

Since the issue was the SATA drive giving up at 273FSB, we also ran additional tests with the IDE hard drive - just to see where we could go on the DFI. With an IDE drive, we reached a setting of 302x14 (4.23GHz) at 1.5V before we ran out of CPU. Frankly, we needed much better cooling than we had at those overclock levels, so we made no attempt to run our benchmark suite on a machine at that overclock level. The LANParty UT 915P-T12 actually performed a bit better in our overclock tests than the big brother 925-T2 that we reviewed in our 925X roundup.

Memory Stress Test Results:

The memory stress test measures the ability of the DFI 915P-T12 to operate at its officially supported memory frequency (533MHz DDR2), at the best performing memory timings that Crucial/Micron PC2-4300U will support. The DFI supports both DDR and DDR2, like the Gigabyte Duo in this 915 roundup. However, all benchmarks and stress testing used DDR2 memory. The stress test was conducted running DDR2 at 533MHz (stock 3:4 ratio) with 2 DIMM slots operating in Dual-Channel mode.

Stable DDR533 Timings - 2 DIMMs (2/4 DIMMs - 1 Dual-Channel Bank)
Clock Speed:	266MHz
Timing Mode:	3:4 (200:266 - Default)
CAS Latency:	3.0
Bank Interleave:	Auto
RAS to CAS Delay:	3
RAS Precharge:	3
Cycle Time (tRAS):	10*

*SPD (Auto) timings for DDR2 are normally 4-4-4-12 at DDR2-533. A tRAS setting of 12 is normal. We ran a series of tests to measure memory bandwidth, and found that the tRAS setting made very little difference in the performance of DDR2. The most effective range of tRAS was 8 to 13 for DDR2 on the 925X chipset, so a tRAS of 10 was chosen for benchmarking.

DFI performs without any problems at the best 3-3-3-10 DDR2 timings that worked well on other 915P boards which use DDR2 in this roundup. Since your memory choice is either DDR or DDR2 on the DFI, but not both, it is not possible to run more than 2 DIMMs in this dual channel board. Memory on the LANParty UT 915P-T12 is limited to the memory that can occupy 2 slots in Dual-Channel mode.