DFI brings overclocking to the masses

DFI HAS LONG been the overclocker's company of choice for boards, and now they are branching out. Yes, it is still all about OCing, but now they are trying to make it more accessible to the layman.

The idea is to have one button overclocking, but do the overclocking right. To this end, DFI harnessed the F1 key and the internet. Each mobo that supports the one button technology has downloadable profiles with four banks of settings. You load a profile, and reboot. Pressing the F1 key loads bank four and tests those settings.

Should those fail, it goes back to bank three, then two and finally one, each one progressively more mild an OC. The goal is idiot-proofing the OC process, and so far, so good.

DFI OC profile site prototype

What you are looking at is the web component of this. There will be downloadable profiles that let you pick your components and it will set optimal timing based on that. If you have a Lanparty DK P45-T2R, you can pick your CPU and OC percentage, and do the same for memory speed, or have a combination of both. Several DRAM vendors are said to be looking at stepping in and providing profiles as well.

Profiles will be specific to board type, memory and CPU, so they should be fairly reliable. If not, it steps back gracefully and allows you to manually tweak things if you feel safe doing that. It looks like DFI is doing all the right things for the right reasons.

DFI had two new boards to note at Computex, the first was a µATX P45 board called the Lanparty P45-T2RS. This is one of the only, if not the only, Lanparty board that comes in such a small form factor. Given where it comes from, if you want a small machine that clocks to the moon, this might be a good choice.

DFI 790GX Lanparty board

OK, we lied, there is another µATX Lanparty board, this one is based on the ATI 790GX chipset. This is a higher binned version of the 780 with two PCIe 16x slots (2x 8x electrically), digital PWMs and DFI 8 channel sound. If that isn't enough, it has 6 SATA II and 12 USB ports. Although it is not explicitly listed, the new SB750 supports RAID5, so that should be there as well. Oh yeah, it should clock real well, too. µ