DFI Lanparty JR P45-T2RS mATX Motherboard Review

Long-term Impressions & Conclusion

Long-term Impressions

Overall, the long-term impressions of the DFI Lanparty JR P45-T2RS are largely positive. Solid capacitors and overall build quality are quite strong, the chipset very runs cool, and voltage is rock solid. On the negative side, long-term overclock stability is quite shaky and running high voltages over time can lead to stability issues.

Solid caps have been a standard for DFI for some time now and are said to be more durable than older style caps. Taking this into account and looking at the overall build quality of the board, we must say the design seems to be excellent. Chipset and MOSFET temperatures remain very low, even after adding higher voltages and running orthos to produce heat. Cool parts are generally durable parts and we have no long-term worries whatsoever seeing a chipset running under 40C.

The issues we had with the board stemmed from running high FSB and doing stability tests over five or more hours. We could not for the life of us get 500+ FSB to be stable enough to say it is solid in the long-term. It is hard to say at this point if we could not find the perfect combination of settings in the complex DFI BIOS, if the board is actually not stable using a high overclock because of four phase PWM (or four layer PCB), or if we just got a bum board. We do want to point out however that we likely spent ten times the time testing this board than a standard user would be willing to devote to it. From reading other users’ experiences with the board in general, it seems like the consistency in quality is just not there. One point to add is it appears DFI is willing to constantly work on BIOS versions for all of their boards, as several have been released since the board became available. Hopefully, in the future DFI will add some auto settings for GTLs, RCOMPs, and skews so users without a degree in computer engineering can overclock the JR P45-T2RS and achieve a standard overclock that will be stable in the long-term.


Conclusion

Well what can we say other than that for a micro ATX board DFI managed to squeeze most things you need into a smaller package. In terms of motherboard features, the Lanparty JR P45-T2RS has almost all of the options of a full-sized board including CrossFire, 8 channel HD audio, heatpipe cooling, CMOS Reloaded and a solid design with all solid capacitors. The only thing really lacking compared to a standard board is a Firewire port. All the features tested in this review worked as promised and setup was quite straightforward.

For motherboard layout, DFI did a good job in squeezing everything possible onto a smaller board. The layout is actually great; connectors are in the most convenient places, the 24 pin ATX connector is out of the way on the right edge and there are two CMOS jumpers (which is good because you will need them!). The PCI-E slots leave enough space to use full-sized water blocks on GPUs or even dual slot coolers although the second card covers one of the CMOS jumpers. One thing in the build that may limit the top end use for enthusiasts is 4 layer pcb and 4 phase PWM.

So we have a micro ATX board that looks and sounds great on paper but what matters to most enthusiasts the most is the overclocking ability. First off, while an advanced BIOS is a good thing, there is such a thing as too advanced. We found that to be able to overclock this board to a point that is easy on most boards with our chip (4.0-4.1Ghz) it was very frustrating and time consuming in this case. If GTL REF voltages, RCOMPS, memory timings, and skews were not perfect the board would just shut down totally when you hit save in the BIOS. The only way to revive it was to flip the power switch and clear CMOS. It would be nice if DFI added a few extra auto settings to give users a starting point. We did manage a respectable overclock of 4066 Mhz, but above that long-term stability just wasn’t there. We have seen some other users of this DFI board boot to 500-600FSB by hardly adjusting anything so it seems these boards may be hit and miss in terms of consistency in quality and overclockability. We also did get an early revision so that could be a contributing factor to this as well. One plus on the BIOS side is DFI frequently releases BIOS updates so this board will only improve in the future.

Crossfire results did make the JR P45-T2RS shine with huge gains in benchmarks and games when moving to two cards. But we should mention the max 8x PCI-E slot speed. Even with a single graphics card, only a maximum of 8x PCI-E is available where many competitor P45 boards allow for 16x when a single card is used. While,the difference is not noticeable with the HD3870 used in these tests this could be a different story with the latest top-end GPU.

To sum this all up, the features on the board work great and the little DFI extras like CMOS Reloaded and the Auto Boost System are icing on the cake. However, the JR P45-T2RS was not perfect for what we care about most: overclocking. We experienced some issues when trying to achieve long-term stability and it was more time consuming than usual to get a decent overclock.

For those looking for a micro ATX board to do some overclocking this DFI board should be perfect, but for a hard core bencher or a user without patience maybe not. All in all, we think this is definitely one of the better options for a micro ATX board and when comparing competitor micro boards there is nothing else on this level. Appealing to a niche market and expanding that market to more advanced users is an innovative move by DFI but there were just too many small issues to warrant any more accolades from us.


Pros

- CrossFire support
- 8 channel HD audio
- Quality design, with solid capacitors
- Efficient board cooling
- Tweakers dream
- Clocks well with low voltage
- Size: Micro ATX
- ABS and CMOS Reloaded


Cons

- Only moderate over stable overclocks
- Not for the novice overclocker
- 4 layer pcb, 4 phase power
- Max 8x single card PCI-E
- Iffy long-term stability at higher voltages