DFI X48 LT T2R: Floats like a Butterfly…

Conclusion

DFI's execution of the P35 T2R motherboard was so close to perfection that any board released after it was bound to face an uphill task to live up to the performance, compatibility, and ease of use that has become synonymous with the product. The LANParty X48 T2R board has managed to equal the P35 when it comes to the simple things like USB ports and plug-in peripherals working as they should - we had no issues to speak of with any of our peripherals whilst using the board. However, overclocking the board to its limits is a little bittersweet.

It's sweet that the fine tuning options allow running components like memory at high bandwidth with the lowest VDIMM we have ever managed with our memory modules. The other positive is that users who don't want to go for elusive levels of FSB will find that the board will run fine without any need of tuning GTL levels right up to 485FSB for dual-core 45nm processors and 420FSB for quad-core 45nm processors. The bitter aspect is that boards from ASUS such as the Rampage Formula are in direct competition to DFI's offering in this segment and can run ultra high FSB speeds and lower tRD levels with relative ease.

As a result of this, there are times when performance on the ASUS boards is actually better than our achievements on the current DFI BIOS and with far less overall effort and time expenditure. Mind you, DFI still has an edge when it comes to flexibility for users who wish to run 8GB of memory. Access to all known chipset registers allows users to give and take on performance so that they can run high processor and memory speeds even with all the DIMM banks populated - there is no doubt DFI is the market leader for memory overclocking.

Right at the very top-end of the performance ladder, we know DFI are working hard to pry everything they can from the X48 chipset, and in order to succeed they need to be able to provide that last few percent of headroom that people have come to expect from DFI products. Right now, for outright brute force overclocking, realizing that additional 1%-2% headroom is not possible. The board's current strengths may not be enough to win over the type of user that will generally choose this type of product to "race".

What we have here is a motherboard not quite able to dominate the DDR2 sector outright, but it certainly sets new standards in other regards. If tweaking is your thing and you have the patience to work with the extensive BIOS options, there is no doubt that the X48 T2R will keep you occupied for a long time. However, DFI's own P35 offers everything a user could need and can be teamed with a dual-GPU card to get around the P35 chipset limit of having a single x16 bandwidth PCIE slot.

We were hoping for a little more performance from this board and despite DFI's efforts thus far, we did not find the final few percent that would have given this board top-DDR2-dog status for 2GB and 4GB memory overclocking (that title still belongs to DFI's P35 LANParty board), but it's certainly an interesting contender. So interesting, that if you are not ready to move to DDR3 and want to run CrossFire, then we suggest you take a look at it.