DFI LANParty UT CFX3200-DR

Testing Methods:

With the exception of SiSoft Sandra's unbuffered memory bandwidth benchmark - which, incidentally, measures real memory bandwidth when you need it most - all of our benchmarks have been engineered to give you numbers that you are likely to find useful when actually using the products we have evaluated in the real world. There are plans to increase the number of benchmarks over time and we're running additional tests that will not be published until we have enough products to make a reasonable comparison.

We are also focusing a lot more of our time on evaluating the stability of the motherboards (and platforms) using a stress test designed to highlight any of the potential weaknesses that the product may have. That involves a gradually increasing amount of stress starting with Prime95 and expanding to IOMeter and 3DMark05 if all is well. This is to ensure that all parts of the system are stressed simultaneously over a period of time.

We believe that the consumer is never likely to subject their platform to this level of stress and we are not expecting every product to complete an entire extended stress test. However, most poorly engineered products fail within the first couple of hours, or even minutes, allowing us to make a conscious decision on whether a motherboard (or platform) is worth your money, regardless of how well it performs in our benchmarks.

CrossFire Test Setup:

AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (operating at 2800MHz - 14x200); 2 x 512MB Corsair 3200XL Pro (operating in dual channel at 400MHz with 2.0-2-2-7-1T timings); 2 x ATI Radeon X1900XT 512MB (operating in CrossFire at 625/1450MHz); Seagate 7200.9 200GB 7,200RPM SATA II hard disk drive; Antec NeoHE 550W (DFI LANParty UT CFX3200-DR), OCZ PowerStream 520W (ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe, ASUS A8R-MVP); Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; ATI Catalyst 6.2 WHQL.

Motherboards:

• DFI LANParty UT CFX3200-DR (ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200);
  
• ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe (ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200);
  
• ASUS A8R-MVP (ATI CrossFire Xpress 1600);

Test Setup:

AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (operating at 2800MHz - 14x200); 2 x 512MB Corsair 3200XL Pro (operating in dual channel at 400MHz with 2.0-2-2-7-1T timings); 1 x BFGTech GeForce 7800 GT OC (operating at 425/1050MHz); Seagate 7200.9 200GB 7,200RPM SATA II hard disk drive; Antec NeoHE 550W (DFI LANParty UT CFX3200-DR), OCZ PowerStream 520W (ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe, ASUS A8R-MVP), OCZ PowerStream 600W (all NVIDIA motherboards); Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA Forceware 82.12.

Motherboards:

• DFI LANParty UT CFX3200-DR (ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200);
  
• ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe (ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200);
  
• ASUS A8R-MVP (ATI CrossFire Xpress 1600);
  
• ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI x16);
  
• ABIT AN8 32X (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI x16);
  
• DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI);

Memory Performance:

The memory performance on the LANParty UT CFX3200-DR seems to be a little lower than the bandwidth available on the ASUS A8R32-MVP when using 'auto' settings. However, how many people buy a LANParty to run it at stock speeds? We tweaked the BIOS and managed to get a massive memory bandwidth improvement - over 300MB/sec more bandwidth from tweaking the timings in the BIOS. You can check out the tweaked settings via SysTool here.