DFI Lanparty Blood Iron P45-T2RS Elite Motherboard Review

Overclocking Results

Socket 775 and the P45 chipset have been around for a while now, so many of you are probably familiar with the ins and outs of overclocking with this chipset/platform. We aren’t going to talk about every possible outcome, but this section will give an overview of our overclocking experiences with the Lanparty BI P45-T2RS Elite.

First off, the board worked flawlessly at stock and arrived pre-installed with the latest official DFI BIOS. It was basically plug and play; we set it up, turned it on, and installed Windows immediately without an issue. Next we tested the preset ABS profiles and although we didn’t spend a whole lot of time on them, everything booted up fine and OCCT ran for an hour no problem. This is great news for a novice user looking to upgrade his CPU from 3000Mhz to 3600Mhz by taking two seconds to load up a BIOS profile


Max System Overclock

Next up we went right for what most users will want: the maximum stable system overclock. This means we want to maximize the CPU and memory overclock while keeping voltages and temperatures in check. 4000Mhz was no problem, we didn’t have to access the advanced BIOS settings and we achieved 4Ghz (445x9, 445Mhz memory) with minimal effort. Of course that is not enough as we want to max this sucker out so we slowly went up, tweaking settings as required. One thing we want to mention right off the bat is this board POSTs like no other. The JR that was tested previously was notorious for not POSTing and then you would have to clear CMOS. But with the Blood Iron, even if the overclock was completely unstable, the board would POST pretty much every time and we only reset COMS a few times throughout the whole process. This however makes it extra important to do pre-Windows tests such as Memtest and Vista’s Memory Diagnosis. If you boot into Windows with memory errors your install, will be corrupted very quickly.


We have tested many motherboards with this Xeon E3110 chip and the maximum overclock always ends up at around 4200Mhz. Some boards make it, others do not. Passing pre-Windows tests and booting the BI P45-T2RS Elite into Windows was reasonably easy but we had some issues completing our suite of stability tests. We would get memory errors and OCCT would drop after 10-20 minutes. Being very familiar with P45 chipset boards and a DFI BIOS we knew we would have to tweak the advanced BIOS settings to get full stability at 4.2Ghz.

After moving into the advanced settings by pressing F9 on the main BIOS screen we were able to find full stability at 4.2Ghz by tweaking TRD, DRAM Skews & RCOMP, GTL settings, RCOMP, and CPU Skews. Since VTT, GTL REF, PLL, and Skew are all metrics controlled by the CPU itself these settings must be in perfect balance or stability is shaky at best. DFI forums have a ton of guides that will help new tweakers to understand the more advanced settings. In the end, the maximum system overclock achieved with the BI P45-T2RS Elite was 4.2Ghz, the maximum the Xeon can run with prolonged stability.


Max FSB + Memory Overclocking

Testing memory and FSB independently, the board performed on par with other P45 boards we have tested in the past. In this review we were using a 4GB kit of memory so huge FSB clocks were limited by the memory but we able to run 500FSB with memory at 1:1 (333/666 strap) giving DDR 1000 at 5-5-5-15. All of the secondary settings you can imagine are available in the BIOS and the auto settings are set up quite well for users that do not want to tweak at that level. We recommend caution in interpreting memory errors, as an improper mix of GTL and skew settings often leads to memory errors. Basically if you have run memory at a certain speed in the past and your timings and voltage is ok but you still get errors, GTL and Skew likely need tweaking.


Out of curiosity, we threw in a 2GB kit of Ballistix PC8500 to see where we could get with FSB. The 4GB Redline was really limiting for FSB benching since it maxed at 520Mhz or so but we knew the Ballistix would bench upwards of 600Mhz. We were very pleasantly surprised that we were able to bench PI 1M at 625FSB and the board likely would have went further but the RAM was erroring out too badly any further. This was a whole new level for the Xeon E3110 as we had never been able to exceed 600FSB in the past!

In the end, we were quite pleased with how the Blood Iron P45-T2RS Elite overclocked. We maxed out the chip without too much effort and the BIOS seemed quite mature and bug free. The board clocked at very high FSB effortlessly and likely would have gone further if we had a better kit of benching RAM around. The different strap settings all functioned properly and CMOS Reloaded makes DFI boards a pleasure to work with. Even a novice user should be able to get a decent overclock with the BI P45-T2RS Elite using only basic BIOS settings and an experienced overclocker should be able to get those precious extra Mhz by using the advanced BIOS settings. All in all the Blood Iron gets a pass from us!