Overclocking

The thoroughbred days of DFI are essentially over - much of this board is rehashed from the AM2+ M2RSH, which we already know, and likewise the BIOS has not changed all that much. With the latest BIOS in hand, we started to crank up the CPU and memory multiplier on our Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition to see just how far it'll go. We managed to squeeze a POST at 3.7GHz, but had to knock it down to 3.6GHz to get stability.

Although using voltage offsets is now the in-thing, it's hard to know exactly how far the CPU is being pushed without a direct reference in the BIOS. We had to save our changes and reload the BIOS to check each time to track the actual change to voltage, and despite giving the cores 1.5V in the end, we couldn't get further than 3.6GHz benchmarkable.

The memory controller clock steadfastly refused to go above 2.4GHz as well, matching the Gigabyte 790FXT-UD5P pretty much, but it's not as good as the competition from MSI. This also became a feature of the HyperTransport overclocking too, where increasing the HT clock meant religiously dropping the integrated memory core multiplier to keep it below 2.4GHz, otherwise we'd get a C1 error POST code, forcing a CMOS reset.

On the HT clock we managed 260MHz, but only after dropping the memory controller down to the elusive 2.4GHz, as well as the CPU multiplier to compensate for the ~3.6-3.7GHz stable limit. In addition, when clocking the HT, the board/CPU does not like high memory multipliers, limiting our efforts to just 1,333MHz. For reference, this was with a 1.46V HT, 1.46V 790FX NB, 1.6GHz x8 HT clock (2,080MHz effective) and 1.3V Southbridge PLL. 260MHz is not bad, but it should be better on a premium 790FX, and the voltage finesse could certainly be improved too.

The CMOS Reloaded has some pre-sets already included and, I suppose, part of the "fun" with DFI boards was working out the kinks of the BIOS, but with modern boards offering an improved layout and somewhat easier attainable performance, it's not all there in comparison.

Power Consumption

DFI's power consumption fares pretty well compared to the competition, partly because it has less actual hardware on the board in the first place to waste away as heat. DFI doesn't employ any power phase switching, so there is only the Cool'n'Quiet offered by the CPU to save power - that is - if you're not overclocking.