Well DFI LanParty is very well known for their good prize to performance ratio when considering a powerful and a potential over-clocker, mostly seen in the Intel sector with their extreme series of motherboard chipsets, like the example of the X38 and the X48 chipsets in the previous core 2. Well we are going to see a media centre range chipset from Intel , well going to be unusual but they are able to capitalise that user gross market they can hit the jackpot for cheap media centre components for the silent HD user in around the house of their theatre centres.
Today we have the opportunity to take a look at another board in the LanParty series from DFI. The LanParty series has always been a favorite of mine because of the tweaking options and the overclocking ability that they have. The board we get to look at today, though, was one that most would not think would belong in that series of boards. It is a micro board, uses the older LGA775 socket coupled with DDR3 memory, and has the G41 chipset that sports the GMA X4500 on-board graphics chip. Does that sound like a board in the LanParty series? We plan to put it through our testing to see if it is a board that you should be looking at for your next upgrade.
The first look at the board really shows us just how compact things are. However, as you use the board, you will see that compact does not mean crowded. The layout of the board was really good, and gave us no issues at all as we set the board up. We were very pleased with the layout. The top right of the board is the location of our 24 pin power connector, which is on the edge of the board where it should be. Just underneath that, and also on the edge of the board, is the IDE connector. The DFI BI G41-T33 only has two DDR3 slots, which should be enough for what this board will be used for. The board supports up to 4GB of DDR3 memory at up to DDR3 1066Mhz. Right in the middle you have a heatsink that covers the G41 chipset. We did have heat issues with this board when raising the vcore. There is an alarm that goes off and is VERY annoying, but it certainly does get your attention! We added a fan to see if it helped with the heat issues that we were having, and it did not help at all. We checked the setup of our water cooler to make sure all was good, and it was. The contact between the heatsink and the chipset also seemed to be just fine, so the board just seems to run hot. It should be mentioned that as long as we did not increase the vcore we were fine.
Finally the verdict in most media motherboards like the one’s in DFI, one of the downright flaws of media mini-ATX boards is the usability of small components inside the motherboards and some cutting in performance and over-clocking potential the limitations of chokes and PMW’s around the core can severely limit performance ratios to more usable apps. But nonetheless, with some rarity in the use of DDR3 memory, this works best not being tampered with.