DFI ICFX3200-T2R/G @ [H] Enthusiast

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

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DFI ICFX3200-T2R/G - DFI brings the highly anticipated ATI RD600 chipset to the enthusiast. Indeed there is already quite a buzz in the forums concerning this board, but is it really the ultimate Crossfire motherboard or is the aging Intel i975x still king?

The DFI ICFX3200-T2R/G motherboard is for professional enthusiasts, the only others that need apply for this board are masochists. DFI has left every knob, lever, and switch exposed in this BIOS so you will need to very much know what you are doing when tweaking or at least have a few months to work through the trial and error.
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Well, it is not a bad motherboard, but I would rather go with a 680i and SLi at this time.

The news that this will be the only Intel RD600 is kinda sad. If AMD's R600 graphics cards
totally wipe the floor with the Nvidia 8000 series, then it will be difficult to assemble a system
with the best processor (Core 2s) and the fastest graphics card (R600).
 
I have a sneaky feeling that once this board comes out, some folks are going to try to fleaBay them for big $$$, pimping them out as a mega-uber-limited-ultra-mondo-rare board... :rolleyes:
 
ir0nw0lf said:
I have a sneaky feeling that once this board comes out, some folks are going to try to fleaBay them for big $$$, pimping them out as a mega-uber-limited-ultra-mondo-rare board... :rolleyes:
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You haven't been reading around, have you? :p
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=246517
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813136032

I've had mine almost three weeks. I got it almost as soon as it became commercially availabe. :) Does 500MHz with minimal effort, IIRC. Definitely too much TIM on the northbridge by default, though. :(
 
mavalpha said:
You haven't been reading around, have you? :p
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=246517
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813136032

I've had mine almost three weeks. I got it almost as soon as it became commercially availabe. :) Does 500MHz with minimal effort, IIRC. Definitely too much TIM on the northbridge by default, though. :(
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My test board would only do 450MHz and even then it wasn't the easiest overclock to get, It was Rock solid though.

Now, I could get it to post up into the 500+ range, but it wouldn't make it into Windows. At 470 it could go into Windows most of the time, but I could never stabalize the system.
 
Interesting, to say the least. It will probably go down as one of the rare mobos that "never really made it" due to its complexity/obscurity. Interesting though still.

And Crossfire should still be available on 975x chipsets, at least, so if R600 is a monster we will probably see a lot of Intel chipset mobo's being sold.
 
jebo_4jc said:
Interesting, to say the least. It will probably go down as one of the rare mobos that "never really made it" due to its complexity/obscurity. Interesting though still.

And Crossfire should still be available on 975x chipsets, at least, so if R600 is a monster we will probably see a lot of Intel chipset mobo's being sold.
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If R600 does beat G80, or even if it comes within 10% of the same performance either way I think they'll be a nice alternative to the 8800GTX for people who don't like NVIDIA or want to switch because of this whole Vista thing.

In any case, I expect the demand for i975x boards to increase if R600 matches up to the G80 cards performance wise. Maybe people will start ditching their 680i board and going back to P965 and i975x boards.
 
Dan_D said:
My test board would only do 450MHz and even then it wasn't the easiest overclock to get, It was Rock solid though.

Now, I could get it to post up into the 500+ range, but it wouldn't make it into Windows. At 470 it could go into Windows most of the time, but I could never stabalize the system.
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It took me a lot of tweaking to get it to even recognize the drives at 400, but after that it just wouldn't stop. :) I think I came to the same conclusion you did: that the southbridge is very finicky on voltages.

My biggest complaint is that I had to pump up the NB or NB PLL every 10MHz-15MHz. :( I started to get worried at 30%.

I disagreed with one conclusion- I never once had to change the NB strap- I got all the way to the top with the 266 strap LOCKED.

BTW, how did you guys do asynchronous RAM OCing? I don't know if it's a problem with my board or RAM, but I can't boot with the RAM even one step over 800. It did 900 on my other board, but took a little tweaking to get there- literally, setting 802 locks up with a C1 error.
 
ATI's RD600

DFI brings the pain in the form of ATI's RD600 chipset. The downside; this will be the only RD600 motherboard ever built. The upside; this will be the only RD600 motherboard ever built. wink Discuss here.
Posted by Kyle 11:24 AM (CST)
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I wish I could "Digg" that blurb... ;)
 
Thanks for this review [H]. It looks like i will be choosing the P5W instead of this based on info here and around other forums.

Call me bitter, but with how pathetic the support for original CFX3200 was, i will not be burned by DFI again.

So long LanParty! Hello (again) Asus!
 
Well I was waiting for a review on this board, pretty much solidifies the Bad Axe 2's place in my next build. I'm a bit bummed though. I was hoping this card might be a sleeper board, but I guess not. :(
 
mavalpha said:
It took me a lot of tweaking to get it to even recognize the drives at 400, but after that it just wouldn't stop. :) I think I came to the same conclusion you did: that the southbridge is very finicky on voltages.

My biggest complaint is that I had to pump up the NB or NB PLL every 10MHz-15MHz. :( I started to get worried at 30%.

I disagreed with one conclusion- I never once had to change the NB strap- I got all the way to the top with the 266 strap LOCKED.

BTW, how did you guys do asynchronous RAM OCing? I don't know if it's a problem with my board or RAM, but I can't boot with the RAM even one step over 800. It did 900 on my other board, but took a little tweaking to get there- literally, setting 802 locks up with a C1 error.
Click to expand...

The board didn't see to like it at all. It got really unstable if I used asynchronous memory settings.
 
Nice read.Thx.I have a retail board.No issues booting from bios over 500fsb.Takes some investment in time.;)
 
Forsaken1 said:
Nice read.Thx.I have a retail board.No issues booting from bios over 500fsb.Takes some investment in time.;)
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Have you tried running the RAM asynchronously, or over 800? It seems both Dan and I had trouble with it.
 
I think the Motherboard is going to be awesome. But nothing out of the ordinary is terms of placement of things it just looks like a regular old mobo than a RD600 MOBO!!!!! :)
 
doesn't crossfire work on any intel chipset.. to my understanding, it just doesn't work on nvidia motherboards
 
Well I think that the motherboard has potential from an overclocking standpoint, It certainly shines as a great overclocker, but the problem is that the board performs below par compared to Intel and NVIDIA chipset based boards. Add that to DFI's inclusion of a seemingly flawed Promise RAID controller and the lackluster SB600 south bridge, I generally say go with P965 or i975x chipset based boards for all your Crossfire needs.

Yes I think the ATI chipset does overclock better, but the P965 Express doesn't fall that far behind in the overclocking department and the i975x seems to still be the best choice for E6600 and up CPUs.
 
Great review. I had been waiting for this for a while.

Just a comment...in the Photoshop Bench V2 benchmark, it is indicated that the DFI board had the fastest time. From what I can tell...it looks like the evga board beat it (although, by a very slim margin).
 
Dan_D said:
Well I think that the motherboard has potential from an overclocking standpoint, It certainly shines as a great overclocker, but the problem is that the board performs below par compared to Intel and NVIDIA chipset based boards. Add that to DFI's inclusion of a seemingly flawed Promise RAID controller and the lackluster SB600 south bridge, I generally say go with P965 or i975x chipset based boards for all your Crossfire needs.

Yes I think the ATI chipset does overclock better, but the P965 Express doesn't fall that far behind in the overclocking department and the i975x seems to still be the best choice for E6600 and up CPUs.
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Actually, there is one thing that makes this better than either of Intel's chipsets: I have some pretty crappy RAM (OCZ 800 Plat- sad when you can call that crappy, huh?), and the ability to run it asynchronously was the deciding factor on this board- I was also considering the Abit QuadGT. The only other chipset that has it is the nForce6, and I was really set on the digital PWM's. The DFI 680i is also supposed to inherit them, but we won't even speculate on when that'll be available. :p
 
mavalpha said:
Actually, there is one thing that makes this better than either of Intel's chipsets: I have some pretty crappy RAM (OCZ 800 Plat- sad when you can call that crappy, huh?), and the ability to run it asynchronously was the deciding factor on this board- I was also considering the Abit QuadGT. The only other chipset that has it is the nForce6, and I was really set on the digital PWM's. The DFI 680i is also supposed to inherit them, but we won't even speculate on when that'll be available. :p
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Well I wasn't able to get the memory to run correctly asynchronously. So I don't know if you will. I know there are some people getting great results on the beta BIOSes.

All 680i boards can run the memory asynchronously in "unlinked" mode but unfortunately, it doesn't work 100% either.
 
Dan_D said:
Well I wasn't able to get the memory to run correctly asynchronously. So I don't know if you will. I know there are some people getting great results on the beta BIOSes.

All 680i boards can run the memory asynchronously in "unlinked" mode but unfortunately, it doesn't work 100% either.
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Mine works PERFECTLY up to 800, but dies promptly at 802. I don't think it's a physical limitation, because it's such an abrupt death. For some reason, I have a hunch that it's something to do with the SPD- either OCZ did something there, or something funky about how DFI reads it.
Would you mind linking me some of the Betas? I haven't seen any yet.

I'm curious to see which is better, all else being equal: nVidia's floating ratios, or ATI/AMD's completely unlocked clockgen. I think NV's solution would have less missed/wasted cycles, but I've also seen it clock down as much as 20MHz because of that "floating" bit.
 
mavalpha said:
Mine works PERFECTLY up to 800, but dies promptly at 802. I don't think it's a physical limitation, because it's such an abrupt death. For some reason, I have a hunch that it's something to do with the SPD- either OCZ did something there, or something funky about how DFI reads it.
Would you mind linking me some of the Betas? I haven't seen any yet.

I'm curious to see which is better, all else being equal: nVidia's floating ratios, or ATI/AMD's completely unlocked clockgen. I think NV's solution would have less missed/wasted cycles, but I've also seen it clock down as much as 20MHz because of that "floating" bit.
Click to expand...

I haven't tried any of the beta BIOS' for the DFI board either. I've just read about what people are experiencing in various forums. So I haven't ever downloaded these betas at this point. The BIOS used on the review board was the most current official BIOS we could get from the DFI website at the time the review was done.

I've seen what you are talking about in reference to memory speeds over 800MHz on the 680i boards. My experiences have been better on the eVGA board than they were on the Striker Extreme in reference to this. The Striker would always use my SLI EPP timings on my OCZ ram, but it would constantly switch between 800MHz at 1T and 889MHz at 2T. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for this and this would happen at random anytime I'd boot or re-boot the machine. The eVGA boards wouldn't do that. They always ran at 889MHz unless I specifically set 900MHz, in which case I'd see 901MHz or 899MHz. Oddly my OCZ XTC PC-2 7200 DDR2 900MHz SLI EPP (2x1024MB) modules worked best on the Biostar T-Force P965 Deluxe board. I couldn't get the timings as low but I could reach 1000MHz DDR2 speeds relatively easily.
 
bigtoe said:
Guys

Don't get me wrong i write guides for everyone to use but please don't practically reproduce it word for word off my site without stating the source of your info.

http://www.thetechrepository.com/showthread.php?t=76 i wrote that for everyone to use and do allow reproduction as long as you give credit for my work.

thanks

Tony
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When I started overclocking this board I did in fact have to do some research to discover what all the settings were for. Many of the settings on the DFI board were unknown to me as I hadn't ever seen many of them on any other motherboard before. I did run across your guide and found it usefull, though not all of your settings were the right ones for me. I used your basic article layout as the format for my list of settings in the review. I didn't think about that at all as I didn't intend it to be a guide or a how to, but rather just a list of settings I used, some of which are very different than what you used. I apologize, no offense was intended.
 
Another interesting read at HardOCP. When reading this article and the comments that followed, I was left thinking about the power consumption. Other motherboard reviews on HardOCP have shown the power consumption at idle/load, stock and overclock. This review pointed up front how cool the chipset ran and that ATi said that the chipset consumed only 9 watts. Now, why wasn't this checked and compared to i965/75 and i680 chipset power consumption levels? Aren't some of your reading constituency using their PCs to fold@home, running their boxes 24/7 and often overclocked? Over the life of such a PC, the original purchase price for the equipment will be a mere pittance compared to the total electrical utility charges accrued.
 
Dan_D said:
When I started overclocking this board I did in fact have to do some research to discover what all the settings were for. Many of the settings on the DFI board were unknown to me as I hadn't ever seen many of them on any other motherboard before. I did run across your guide and found it usefull, though not all of your settings were the right ones for me. I used your basic article layout as the format for my list of settings in the review. I didn't think about that at all as I didn't intend it to be a guide or a how to, but rather just a list of settings I used, some of which are very different than what you used. I apologize, no offense was intended.
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Dan

I help many reviewers as well as end users and really i do not mind anyone reproducing in reviews or forum posts my work. What i do not like it non reference to my work if it helped. My guides are there for everyone to use....including reviewers ;)


No offense was felt here, I would just hope you would make reference to my guide in your review please.
 
Just a question regarding AMD/ATI boards based on intel chipsets. I find it funny that when the merger was announced people speculated that Intel would prevent ATI from designing chipsets for intel processors. When, it turns out, AMD/ATI themselves have stopped designing them on their own accord.

Do I have this right? Am I interpreting this statement, from the article, correctly?

AMD/ATI confirmed to me that this will be the only motherboard built using this chipset as AMD buying ATI put a damper on forging ahead with motherboard chipsets built for Intel products (page 6, DFI ICFX3200-T2R/G Review, Tuesday February 6, 2007).

Or, do I have it backwards?
 
Since the merger of ATI and AMD, ATI has cancelled the RD600 chipset. DFI has a stock of chipsets purchased before the cancellation was made. DFI appears to be the only manufacturer that did this. Therefore all the chipsets that were released are in DFI's hands. Therefore this will be the only RD600 board that will be manufactured at this point.

So yes, it is ATI/AMD that has decided not to allow their chipsets to be used for Intel processors going forward. I read an unconfirmed report that this is partially due to Intel refusing to allow ATI to develop Intel compatible chipsets for upcomming 1333MHz FSB (likely 45nm) processors.

I have no idea if that part is true. As is the case with much of what you read on the internet, the information is suspect.
 
jcollett said:
Another interesting read at HardOCP. When reading this article and the comments that followed, I was left thinking about the power consumption. Other motherboard reviews on HardOCP have shown the power consumption at idle/load, stock and overclock. This review pointed up front how cool the chipset ran and that ATi said that the chipset consumed only 9 watts. Now, why wasn't this checked and compared to i965/75 and i680 chipset power consumption levels? Aren't some of your reading constituency using their PCs to fold@home, running their boxes 24/7 and often overclocked? Over the life of such a PC, the original purchase price for the equipment will be a mere pittance compared to the total electrical utility charges accrued.
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I hear what you are saying, and I understand. I found this information in ATI PR material I had read. I never checked to see if the 9w load is true. I also do not know how many watts the Intel and NVIDIA chipsets use on their own. It was a comment in the review made as a note based on my continuing surprise that ATI motherboard chipsets run twice as cool as anything else. So that 9w statement is based on what ATI says and wasn't checked for verification. If you'll read the exact text of the statement, it was also referenced as a claim from ATI and not a difinitive fact concerning the chipset. I honestly don't know if this is true or not.
 
jcollett said:
Another interesting read at HardOCP. When reading this article and the comments that followed, I was left thinking about the power consumption. Other motherboard reviews on HardOCP have shown the power consumption at idle/load, stock and overclock. This review pointed up front how cool the chipset ran and that ATi said that the chipset consumed only 9 watts. Now, why wasn't this checked and compared to i965/75 and i680 chipset power consumption levels? Aren't some of your reading constituency using their PCs to fold@home, running their boxes 24/7 and often overclocked? Over the life of such a PC, the original purchase price for the equipment will be a mere pittance compared to the total electrical utility charges accrued.
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System power consumption numbers are here - http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2891&p=6

This chipset runs anything but cool when overclocking. ;)
 
67shelby said:
System power consumption numbers are here - http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2891&p=6

This chipset runs anything but cool when overclocking. ;)
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That's pretty interesting. The power efficiency could be a reason to choose this besides Crossfire. The performance difference within a few percent is fairly negligible and that 680i system is gonna eat a lot more power over the system lifetime.

Although from the sounds of things this board can never be a true volume product.
 
Dan_D said:
I read an unconfirmed report that this is partially due to Intel refusing to allow ATI to develop Intel compatible chipsets for upcomming 1333MHz FSB (likely 45nm) processors.

I have no idea if that part is true. As is the case with much of what you read on the internet, the information is suspect.
Click to expand...

That's interesting. I guess we'll never really know the reason. Each company can just point the finger at the other. Kind of disappointing, really. It would be nice to have ATI designing chipsets for intel processors (I think I screwed that up on in my last post, meant to say "...that intel would prevent AMD/ATI from designing chipsets for their processors" I've edited that post to make it clearer).
 
tigen said:
Although from the sounds of things this board can never be a true volume product.
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Oh, it'll definitely be limited-run. Read above: AMD only made one or two batches of this chipset, and DFI bought them all up. Once their current inventory runs out, that's the end of it. :(
 
Dan_D said:
Since the merger of ATI and AMD, ATI has cancelled the RD600 chipset. DFI has a stock of chipsets purchased before the cancellation was made. DFI appears to be the only manufacturer that did this. Therefore all the chipsets that were released are in DFI's hands. Therefore this will be the only RD600 board that will be manufactured at this point.

So yes, it is ATI/AMD that has decided not to allow their chipsets to be used for Intel processors going forward. I read an unconfirmed report that this is partially due to Intel refusing to allow ATI to develop Intel compatible chipsets for upcomming 1333MHz FSB (likely 45nm) processors.

I have no idea if that part is true. As is the case with much of what you read on the internet, the information is suspect.
Click to expand...

This is a huge deal in my book. Less work will be done on drivers for this one board using a unique to it chipset, etc. I just don't get why anyone would use this MB when Intel chipset ones perform better.

Edit: just look at the pain ULi chipset owners are having now with Vista.
 
This really is too bad. I really think with some time and tweaking that BIOS and chipset driver updates could have greatly narrowed any performance gaps in this chipset.

Oh well, I guess it will be the Badaxe or the P5W for me when I do my build.
 
Dan_D said:
It runs cooler than the Intel and AMD chipsets do.
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Not if you want to run this board at 535FSB stable, it requires 1.9V+ on the Northbridge. That will get you about 60C on the stock heatsink, not exactly cool. :rolleyes:
 
67shelby said:
Not if you want to run this board at 535FSB stable, it requires 1.9V+ on the Northbridge. That will get you about 60C on the stock heatsink, not exactly cool. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

I could get it to post near those speeds, but mine wouldn't run stable like that. So the chipset never really got all that hot in my tests.
 
DFI brings the pain in the form of ATI's RD600 chipset. The downside; this will be the only RD600 motherboard ever built. The upside; this will be the only RD600 motherboard ever built.
Click to expand...

Yes! KUDOS! to whomever penned that turn of phrase. Very good word play and makes the point quite nicely.:p
 
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