DFI LanParty DK P55-T3eH9 – Features

Dissimilar Asrock and Asus information technology appears that DFI is pinning all their P55 hopes and dreams on just a few select motherboards. In fact, as I write this the LanParty DK P55-T3eH9 is their only P55 motherboard on sale, though we do know of a few others still in the works. Availability does not appear to be that great, either. We only found a handful of online retailers that were actually selling this motherboard.

The DFI LanParty DK P55-T3eH9 is targeted at a similar audition to the Asus P7P55D Palatial, though on boilerplate it appears to be almost xv% cheaper. Although it forfeits a few features compared to the latter, such as Firewire and a secondary Gigabit LAN port, for the nigh part this looks to be another well equipped P55 motherboard. Let'south bank check the features out in greater particular.

In full the lath can support up to ix SATA devices, just similar the P7P55D Deluxe, via the same JMicron controllers. Providing the board with its powered eSATA port is the JMicron JMB363 controller, while the JMB322 boosts onboard SATA ports from half dozen to 8.

Given that the LanParty DK P55-T3eH9 motherboard is targeting gamers at that place are 3 PCI Express x16 slots. Once again, when using two graphics cards in either Corssfire or SLI mode, the available bandwidth is halved as each port is limited to x8 bandwidth. The second generation PCI Express interface still provides today's graphics cards with more than enough bandwidth fifty-fifty when operating at x8 rather than x16.

The lath's audio is taken care of by the Realtek ALC885 codec, i of the cheapest used past any of the P55 motherboards in our roundup. Despite this the ALC885 is still a decent solution offering viii-channel Hd audio.

Although DFI may not have included the very best audio codecs in this relatively expensive P55 motherboard, they take gone for a quality network controller. The Intel 82578DC makes this the just motherboard in our roundup to feature a quality network controller, as all other manufacturers opted for cheaper Realtek solutions.

Something interesting about the LanParty DK P55-T3eH9 is that information technology includes a mini USB port on the I/O panel, which at first appears to be a near useless characteristic, but is actually a stroke of brilliance: it allows users to quickly and hands resurrect their system in the event of a BIOS flash going incorrect.

Although BIOS updates are a lot less scary than they employ to exist, things can still become awry and more often than not when that happens in that location is no easy fix. Instead of having to send your motherboard back to the manufacturer and so that the BIOS bit tin can be replaced, DFI'due south solution allows the user to re-wink the motherboards BIOS from some other estimator using the mini USB port and a special software.

Of form y'all will need some other system to consummate this process just stumbling beyond a desktop or laptop in this twenty-four hours and age is considerably easier than aircraft the board back to Taiwan.

As luck would have it while working on this very roundup I ran into this problem when testing the MSI P55-GD65, which we will detail a few pages later, though because this happened to an MSI lath and not the LanParty DK P55-T3eH9 information technology was in fact quite unfortunate. What happened was that MSI emailed us an updated BIOS for their P55-GD65 motherboard and strongly suggested that we use it in our tests.

Therefore we proceeded to install the new BIOS. The update was seemingly a success, or so it was reported by the provided software, but the lath was never able to boot up again. Having tried all the standard recovery methods nosotros were unable to exhale life back into this brand new and virtually unused motherboard.

After shipping the lath dorsum to MSI we received a new P55-GD65 to complete our testing. All this stuffing around could have been hands avoided had the MSI board featured the same BIOS recovery applied science as the LanParty DK P55-T3eH9. Even so, do not await other manufacturers to simply copy this characteristic. DFI has patented the applied science, meaning it volition remain exclusive to their motherboards, or at the very least competitors will have to pay royalties if they desire to implement information technology on their own products.