DFI LanParty P35 Motherboard Review

PCI Express is a very flexible technology in that it's based around the concept of  "lanes" of data flow. If you need more bandwidth then simply throw some more PCI Express lanes at it and you'll be good to go. The downside to this is that you can never know exactly how many PCIe lanes a particular motherboard has without consulting the chipset specifications.

For instance the LP UT P35 T2R has 3 16x PCIe slots and 1 1x PCIe slot available.  However only 1 contains a full 16x while the other 2 split up the remander either with 1x each or 4x at the middle most PCIe slot.

8gb of DDR2 memory is supported across the 4 available slots at speeds of up to 800Mhz.  Faster memory will work on this motherboard and is auto detected during POST.  Dual channel memory is supported provided that matching memory modules are present in opposing memory banks.

Digital PWM (Digital Pulse Width Modulation) power supplies are becoming the norm on high end hardware and this boards comes with a monster 8-phase unit in place of the standard 6 phase one found on the DFI NF680I LT

In the world of BIOS controlled overclocking its hard to image that you would still find jumpers scattered around a motherboard but low and behold DFI threw us a curve ball. Here you will see a bank of 3 jumpers that allow you to physically change the FSB settings to any one of the 3 major stopping points 800/1066/1333.

In keeping with LanParty tradition easy to access power and reset switches are located near the south bridge chip. A new feature is "EZ Clear" which allows you to clear the CMOS without switching a jumper. Simply hold both buttons down for 4+ seconds and power the system on.