DFI Lanparty Blood Iron P45-T2RS Elite 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 Lanparty BI P45-T2RS Elite 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.


The voltage set in the BIOS for the Xeon chip is +0.3v over VID (which is 1.2v) giving a total of 1.5v BIOS, 1.49v actual. Under load the vcore dropped to a minimum of 1.44v, a droop of 0.5v. Taking into account that this is with vdroop control in the BIOS enabled, a .05v droop from idle to load on the BI P45-T2RS Elite is not too bad at all. We have seen much worse vdroop in the past with other budget boards. Ideally we like to see about .02-.03v droop; however it is important to note the more voltage used, the harder the motherboard's voltage regulation ICs must work and the higher the droop will be, thus vdroop is less with a more modest overclock.

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. Since it is a budget board, the BI P45-T2RS Elite 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.


Heat Analysis

Similar to many other P45 chipset boards, the Northbridge on the Lanparty BI P45-T2RS Elite runs remarkably cool, even without a fancy heatpipe cooler or fan. Measuring the Northbridge heatsink with a digital thermometer, temperatures hover around 31-32C even when the system is at full load. To put that in perspective, human body temperature is 37C, so we run hotter than the NB!


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 40% overclock (4200Mhz), stressed for five hours, CPU temperatures remained in check (around 60C load) and the chipset did not exceed 35C. As a result, we have no long term concerns over heat on this board, as long as reasonable voltages are used.