DFI Lanparty JR P45-T2RS mATX Motherboard Review

Voltage Regulation & Heat Analysis

Voltage Regulation

When evaluating a board’s voltage regulation, we first need to know what a few voltages refer to. More specifically vcore - BIOS set vcore, vcore in windows, and vcore under load. In theory these numbers should all be the same but load line droop (commonly known as Vdroop) is an intentional part of any Intel power delivery design specification.

Droop by definition is the real voltage delta from idle to load on a motherboard. Vdroop is usually larger for quads due to the extra power going through the voltage regulation integrated circuits and some boards have larger vdroop than others, depending partly on the quality of the voltage regulation of the board.

What we will look at on the DFI JR P45-T2RS is vdroop and how smooth the voltage line on an overclocked system is over a 5 hour period. For these tests OCCT monitoring is used.


Voltage set in the BIOS for the Xeon chip is 1.40v, giving 1.39v idle and 1.36v load. Taking into account that this is with vdroop control in the BIOS enabled, a .03v droop from idle to load on the JR P45-T2RS is excellent. However, it is important to note the more voltage used, the harder the motherboard voltage regulation ICs must work and the higher the droop will be. This also holds true for quad core CPUs with higher power requirements.

There are numerous other factors regarding the voltage stability such as how many layers the PCB has, what type of PWM (Pulse-Width Modulation) it uses, and the voltage regulation IC itself. Due to its small size, the JR P45-T2RS uses a 4 layer pcb, 4 phase digital PWM, and a pretty standard voltage regulation IC. This somewhat limits the extreme capabilities of the board although short benching sessions at high voltage are manageable. We discussed some voltage issues with long-term stability in the overclocking section and this will be revisited under long-term impressions. It seems that although it is available, users must be careful to not use more voltage than the voltage regulation transistors and ICs can handle safely.


Heat Analysis

Similar to many other P45 chipset boards, the Northbridge on the DFI JR P45-T2RS runs remarkably cool, even with a simple heatpipe cooler. Measuring the Northbridge heatsink with a digital thermometer, temperatures hover around 34-36C, even when the system is at full load.


A point worth mentioning is the cooler over the MOSFETS. This is often the hot spot on DFI boards and we have seen many blown fets (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor or MOSFETS / transistors for short) in this area over the years. This generally occurs when the voltage regulation circuit is overloaded and thus heat over a long period. For example, when users run Orthos / Prime on a quad core CPU at high voltages over long periods these transistors tend to fail and burn up. To compensate for the high heat output, DFI provides a MOSFET cooler, which is attached to the Northbridge via heatpipe. The PLUS version of the board adds a second MOSFET cooler over the voltage regulation IC area to allow for more extreme voltages to be used.


As for CPU and board temperatures, everything looks good. There are a few hot spots on the board around the voltage regulation areas, but even at a 35% overclock (4066Mhz), stressed for five hours, CPU temperatures remained in check (around 60C load) and the MOSFET cooler did not exceed 40C. As a result, we have no long term concerns over heat on this board, as long as reasonable voltages are used.