DFI Infinity 865PE (Springdale) Motherboard Review

Since Pentium 4's are multiplier locked the only option you have is to increase the FSB. The only tricky part is how do you know what your memory is running at?? Well in the case of the 86SPE by choosing the SPD setting the bios will auto configure your memory to whatever it is programmed to run at. Alternatively by choosing any of the pre-determined memory clock speeds your memory will run at that speed plus whatever you add to the FSB. For instance running at 217Mhz FSB with the memory clock at 400Mhz will render a final memory clock of 434Mhz (or the max our XMS3500 was rated at), by setting the memory clock to 333Mhz the FSB can be raised considerably higher without the fear of running your memory modules out of frequency. This is a different approach from what Abit has chosen to do with their system clock dividers but basically works in much the same way.

A strange thing happened when raising the FSB, with the Super PATCH enabled we saw the highest performance boost at 217Mhz with the memory running 1:1. through to go any higher than that the Super PATCH needed to be disabled so the memory clock could be reduced. The memory scores pretty much tell you what the outcome of this was.