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DFI LAN Party UT X58

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:39:52 -0500

There's a party on this motherboard and you're invited!

Motherboards can’t just sit quietly in your case and service your parts anymore. Today, motherboards also must advertise to the entire world that you have one badass system. Hoping to outdo all others, DFI’s LAN Party UT X58 Core i7 motherboard features a massive heat pipe appendage, called the “Flame Chiller,” that juts out the back of your case.

The idea is to transport heat from the heatsinks attached to the board’s power regulators and chipset to outside the case, where it can be cooled by the exhaust from the case. Does it work? The concept makes sense, but we’re a bit skeptical of the small contact patch the heat pipe makes with the board. The external heatsink never got hot in our tests, but we typically don’t overclock test boards far enough to overheat voltage regulators. The Flame Chiller looks cool, though!

This board’s not all about flash and panache, however. The board’s tri-SLI implementation is certainly better than on other X58 boards we’ve tested. While other boards’ x16 PCI-E slot arrangements force you to either buy a specific case enclosure or hack-saw off a portion of your videocard to get a tri-SLI configuration up and running, the LAN Party UT X58’s tri-SLI will work in most cases.

With tri-SLI as one possible config, DFI also properly laid out the SATA ports. All eight of the SATA ports on the board are accessible even with three huge GPUs in place. Another two eSATA ports are available on the backplane, too.

DFI’s audio implementation is also pretty interesting. Instead of an audio card riser that stabs into an x1 slot or some custom slot alternative, the riser board (with Realtek codecs on it to lower board electrical noise) connects to the mobo via a ribbon cable. This lets you place the board wherever it’s convenient. Alas, while other enthusiast boards give you X-Fi compatibility through drivers or licensed hardware, the LAN Party UT X58 sticks to basic Realtek codecs and drivers, which aren’t quite as good.

After spending some time overclocking Intel’s threadbare DX58SO board (see page 40), we really appreciate how the LAN Party UT X58 offers far more switches and knobs to turn. One thing DFI needs to add, though, is a status page, so you can tell what your tweaks have changed. For example, you should be able to see what DRAM frequency you have selected instead of calculating it manually.

In our overclocking tests with the LAN Party UT X58, we didn’t get our engineering sample Core i7-965 to the speeds that we did with the DX58SO (just shy of 4GHz), but we spent considerably more time with the Intel board than we can with any review board. Spending more time learning the intricacies of this board’s BIOS could very well improve the overclocking performance.

Unfortunately, DFI’s board doesn’t distinguish itself on the benchmark performance beat, either—it clocks scores that are very similar to all the other X58 boards we’ve tested. DFI does set its Turbo Mode much higher than other boards, but that didn’t seem to impact performance at all.

So what’s the practical upshot? We still prefer the features and onboard X-Fi of the MSI Eclipse SLI that we reviewed in February, but the DFI LAN Party UT X58 comes in a close second.

Asus Rampage II Extreme

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:00:00 -0500

To run Asus’s $400 Rampage II Extreme board you’d have to be either extreme or the world’s biggest poseur. How extreme would you have to be? You’d have to be the type of person who boils liquid helium atop his CPU to keep it cool. And because you can’t waste time overclocking from within the OS, you’d want to reach your hands into the guts of your case and use the board’s PCB-mounted controls that let you check and change voltage, fan speeds, and temps on a tiny one-line LCD external display.

In fact, you’d be so damn hardcore, you wouldn’t even fully trust those voltage readings from the board. Instead, you’d want to hook your Fluke meter directly to the available ports on the board to check the voltage of the CPU, the PCI Express lanes, and the north bridge directly. That’s how badass you’d be.

OK, but what if you’re just a poseur? Don’t worry, you’re set, too. Just fire up the OS applet, set your 3.2GHz Core i7-965 to “i7-crazy-4.0,” and you’re good to go. Now people will think you’re an extreme overclocker when all you did was let the board do the work for you.

Whether you’re a poseur or an extremist, the Rampage II Extreme has everything you need, including six DIMM slots, tri-SLI, and CrossFireX support, as well as licensed Creative audio support that gives you up to EAX4. There are some problems, however. Our biggest issue is that Asus still can’t seem to get Turbo mode to work correctly. You should be able to set Turbo mode based on the thread load on the CPU, but Asus only lets you overclock all cores simultaneously. We also felt overwhelmed by the applets on the board. Between the controls for AI Suite, TurboV, TweakIt, and EPU-6, we couldn’t keep straight what each tool did, and ultimately ignored them all.

As we’ve noted in previous reviews, differences in how motherboard vendors treat their BIOSes and Core i7 overclocking options make it difficult for us to run an exact apples-to-apples comparison among boards. For what it’s worth, though, the Rampage II Extreme fell right into the middle of the pack in our benchmarks. With BIOS updates for i7 boards arriving on a monthly schedule, it’s clear that third-party boardmakers are still trying to get a handle on the brave new world of Core i7.
So, say you’re not that extreme nor do you want to appear to be, well then, we think you’re probably better off with a different, less expensive board.

May 2005 - Motherboards: A to Z

The Maximum PC Staff — Sun, 01 May 2005 00:00:00 -0500

In the PDF archive of the May 2005 issue, you can find:

Motherboards A to Z
MMORPGs
Water Cooling
A behind-the-scenes look at product testing
Product Reviews including the Asus Vento 3600 Gaming Case!
Ask the Doctor
Rig of the Month
The Watchdog
And a whole lot more!

Click the big giant cover image to the right to download the PDF archive today!