Friday, October 02, 1998

Introduction

In this new review, I am introducing to you the DFI P2XBL motherboard based on the Intel 440BX Chipset. Curiously, I have pretty much difficulties to seize the reasons that have governed DFI engineers when they have designed this motherboard !

The final design and layout of this motherboard is not really bad but the final result is rather questionable. For instance, they used to install 3 memory banks, 4 PCI slots and 3 ISA slots (and of course one AGP slot) while most of the motherboards are using a 4-5-2, a 3-5-2 or a 4-4-3 design. With such a design the less we can say its that the expendability is rather limited. Furthermore, they used to put several Tantalum capacitors instead of only electrolytic capacitors and in my opinion this is not an ideal situation. On the other hand, they did a Jumper-Less design by using a dip switch set on the motherboard for the processor multiplier settings coupled with a SoftMenu design in the BIOS to set the Front Bus frequencies ! Finally, they did a multi language users manual published in 3 languages (English, French and German) but only some part of the texts are translated and the users manual is pretty conservative by giving only few details about this motherboard technical information, setting and installation information.

The following photography is showing the layout of this motherboard, As you can see, the small yellow balls are the Tentalum capacitors used instead of electrolytic capacitors. The dip switch set is visible between the processor connector and the printer connector at the upper right corner. In the lower right corner, you can see the ATX power connector and in the lower left corner you have all the accessories connectors on a straight line between the Bios chip and the primary hard disk drive connector.

Installation

The installation of this motherboard is not more complicated than any other motherboard but a special note has to be mentioned about the processor support bracket. The bracket holding the processor cartridge on the slot one connector is not using screws as it is normally the case in most of the motherboards. Instead of screws, there are four plastic legs splitted in half with a conical hole in their center where a plastic pin is passing by. When you first install the bracket on the motherboard, you must align the four legs with the corresponding holes of the motherboard and apply enough pressure so the legs are driven correctly in place through the motherboard holes. Then, you push on the plastic pins to firmly secure the legs into their holes. The first time I installed the bracket I didn't accomplished this operation correctly and as a result the processor cartridge couldn't establish a good electrical contact in its connector so the computer refused to boot. The problem with this system is that when you are driving the plastic legs through the motherboard holes, you must apply a very good pressure until the legs snaps through the holes and is clearly visible on the back of the motherboard. This system, in my opinion, is not ideal because not enough pressure will result in a bad installation and the support bracket wont seat correctly in place while too much pressure could damage the motherboard. So. a very great care has to be taken with this system to avoid serious problems.

Functionalities

As mentioned earlier, the configuration of this motherboard is in part accomplished by a Dip switch set and in part by the BIOS SoftMenu. The multipliers settings offered by the dip switches are ranging from 2.0x to 8.0x in .5X steps while the clock frequencies offered by the BIOS 'Chipset Features Setup" are covering frequencies from 66 to 150MHz plus a default value position which is enabling auto-setting of the Front Bus frequency determined upon the processor type detected. As a fact, this motherboard offers a pretty good Overclockability. This feature makes this motherboard a pretty good candidate for Overclocking but its lack of adjustment of the CPU voltages is making it almost useless because as most of the experienced Overclockers know's the CPU voltage must often be uppered a bit to work correctly at higher clock frequencies. Among the other functionalities of this motherboard, there are: the Power Supply Failure Alarm, Automatic Fan Control activated by the processor temperature, the Dual Button function allowing to either turn the Power-off or turn-on the Suspend mode, the External Modem Ring-On which turn-on the power when the modem detects a ring, RTC Timer to Power-on the system to a pre-set time and date, the Wake-on LAN, and the Virus protection. Finally, there are no provision in the BIOS setup to adjust the RAM timing but this is not of a great disadvantage as there are no phenomenal performance gain to be obtainned from these settings anyway.

The Benchmarks

The tests were all performed under Win95 OSR2.

The system setup was as following:

Motherboard: DIF P2XBL
CPU: Intel Pentium II 350mhz
Memory: 128mb PC100 SDram (LGS)
IDE first channel Primary port: Quantum Fireball EIDE ST 3.2A
IDE second channel Primary port: AOpen CD-ROM drive CD-936E
PCI slot number 2: Matrox Millenium 4Wram graphic card
ISA slot number 2: Ensoniq Soundscape soundcard
ISA slot number 1: US Robotic 56k X2 modem
OS: Win95B OSR2 4.00.950B

Winbench98 CPUmark 32

This motherboard with its score of 877 is coming to the second place on the chapter of the performance when measuring the CPU performance.

Winbench98 FPU Winmark

The results obtained for the measurement of the FPU indices is also indicating a very good performance for this motherboard.

Winstone98

The Winstone98 overall system performance evaluation is indicating that this motherboard is getting the best overall performances obtained to date among all the motherboards tested on this site.

The below evaluation table is summarizing the strong points and the weak points of motherboards. No need to remember to you that we never buy a motherboard only for its performances. Most of today's motherboards are exhibiting performances very close to each others, so, we need additional information in order to help us distinguish what are the real advantages of a motherboard compared to the others and this is exactly where is coming into help this evaluation table.

The score obtained for this motherboard is 85 points out of 100. This is a typical indication of a high performance motherboard affected by a rather questionable design. As a matter of fact, this motherboard could have gained 4 more additional points if it would have had 5 PCI slots and 4 memory banks for instance, 2 more points could also have ben credited for a better filtration and the non use of Tentalum capacitors, another 2 points could have been gained by a more detailed users manual and finally a screwed processor bracket would have given another 2 points additional. If we add all these loosed points this would have given the first place to this motherboard !

The strong points

The strong points of this motherboard are; its excellent performances and its Jumper-Less design.

The weak points

The weak points of this motherboard are: its not enough detailed users manual, the use of Tentalum capacitors, its rather restricted expendability and its cheap processor support bracket.

Conclusions

My conclusions about this motherboard are that its really not a motherboard to avoid because it has some weakness but just a motherboard requiring that the user is sure that it will fit all its needs. This motherboard is for sure a very good performer but its design makes it probably better suited for experimented users able to correctly gauge their needs.

For any additional information, please visit DFI web site.