DFI Lanparty Blood Iron P45-T2RS Elite Motherboard Review

BIOS Rundown

Ever since DFI brought in BIOS engineer and legend Oskar Wu, DFI boards have become known for having some of the most advanced and feature rich BIOS on the market. Even the basic BIOS of a DFI budget board is more advanced than most enthusiast boards from other manufacturers. On top of that, pressing F9 reveals a whole extra set of BIOS settings, all of which the user can tweak to get those extra few Mhz.

The Lanparty BI P45-T2RS Elite features an Award BIOS with 8Mbit SPI flash as well as the CMOS Reloaded feature. As mentioned in the software section, CMOS Reloaded allows users to use BIOS presets by pressing user defined hotkeys upon POST. To enter the BIOS initially, the delete key is used when the POST screen comes up.


By default, The Lanparty BI P45-T2RS Elite displays a brown splash screen and Blood Iron logo consistent with the marketing on the box. The BIOS also has an option to disable the splash screen to allow viewing of POST messages. Disabling of splash screens is recommended when overclocking in order to see what speed the system is booting at from the POST screen and to view other POST information.


Starting with the main page in DFI’s Award BIOS, we see many subpages. The pages that are most useful to us for overclocking are the Genie BIOS Setting, PC Health Status, and CMOS Reloaded. Advanced BIOS Features is also a useful page as it contains settings like Hard Disk priority, which is where you can change to a USB drive for BIOS flashing. There is also boot device priority and some other boot options. If you scroll to the bottom of the screen you will find the option to disable the POST screen.


The next two subpages of the main AwardBIOS page we will cover quickly are PC Health Status and CMOS Reloaded. The PC Health Status page is rather advanced compared to some boards we have seen, likely because of a higher-end monitoring chip. CPU, chipset, and PWM temperatures are shown as well as a number of voltages. Voltages monitored include: Vcore, vmem, vNB, VTT, as well as all PSU rails.

CMOS Reloaded page in the BIOS looks like the ABS II software. Users are provided with four banks where they can save custom BIOS settings and this allows for quick reloading of BIOS settings which is great for overclocking. Shown in the screen capture above are the three automatic CPU upgrade settings that come pre-installed on the motherboard.


We will start with the main screen on the Genie BIOS Setting menu. This menu contains three submenus: CPU Feature, DRAM Timing, and Voltage Setting as well as some other important settings like FSB and memory dividers. CPU Clock Ratio (multiplier) and CPU clock (FSB) are the settings used to change the FSB and multi of the system. Boot UP Clock allows for booting at a different clock which is helpful when you run high FSB so you can boot at a lower clock and then move up to your desired FSB. CPU Clock Amplitude settings are essentially clock output strengths and tweaking these settings helps with higher FSB. CPU Clock Skews are the skew clocks for the Northbridge, also useful for achieving higher FSB. Optimal settings for the Amplitude and Skews on our test CPU are 800/100/0. Under the CPU Feature subscreen we recommend disabling all settings except for Multi-Core Processing when overclocking.


Next up we have DRAM Speed and DRAM Timings. There are seven DRAM Speed settings available which allow for different straps and RAM speeds and the DRAM timings are the memory main (tCL, tRCD, tRP, tRAS) and subtimings. Every setting even the most advanced RAM tweaker would want is present.


Clock Setting Fine Delay is a subscreen of the DRAM Timings screen. Here DLL and RCOMP tables are located. The DRAM DLL table is a base for calculating clock delays and the RCOMP values are impedence ratings of chipset registers. In plain English, DLL and RCOMP control signals between CPU, NB, and RAM and are essential for successful overclocking. Recommended profiles for DRAM and RCOMP are 3/3/1, 5/5/1, and 0/0/2.