Quote Originally Posted by erwinz View Post
you have use Abit IP35 Pro.. how can you compare it to DFI LP P35??
Chalk & cheese the 2 boards probably could not be any further apart if you tried.

Don't get me wrong the Abit is imo a fabulous board especially when you consider it costs 1/2 the price of the DFI but at the end of the day if its an enthusiasts board you are after the DFI wins hands down.

The Abit offers great mega rock solid performance straight out of the box with a super simple setup for a very decent price it definitely gets my

The DFI is eye wateringly expensive & takes a lot of tweaking & tinkering with just to match the Abits performance however the DFI can run anything you throw at it, it will bench just about anything you can dream up to try on it & you can tell where the money has been spent (PWM & Heatpipe) as it runs amazingly cool even ringing the nuts out of a quad & the voltages are super stable.

Here are a few of my major pros & cons.

Abit Pro's: Excellent board layout, Great performance, Easy setup, Good Value, uGuru overclocking & monitoring software is outstanding.

Cons/suggestions for improvement if I really have to say something remotely negative about this board: Beef up PWM, make heatpipe heatsinks flat so we can mount fans on them, add on/off reset buttons to board like DFI/Asus etc.

DFI Pros: Makes bootable stable fsb really easy, runs cool thanks to the great heatpipe, 10 billion setting for the enthusiast to play with, performance flexibility from 2-4ghz DDR600-1200 CL3-5 is great it will run anything, EZ clear/CMOS reloaded & the onboard on/off/reset etc etc etc basically all you would expect from DFI.

DFI Cons: Memory slot clips foul on graphics card (too close) however they are not un usable just an annoyance but one you can live with when you consider the amount of PCI-E/PCI slots the board has. Smartguardian sucks now I have been blessed with uGuru on the Abit & thats it for now remember I have only had this board for a few days.

The Abit IP35 Pro uses an analogue 4 phase PWM which runs cool with a dual core even @ 3.8GHz it only just hits 60oC passively cooled which is far better than any other board out there like the Asus, Gigabyte & MSI which I count as one of the boards strong points as this means average Joe like my self can get a blistering overclock from this board straight out of the packet on the stock heatpipe.

As much as the simple Analogue PWM is an advantage for dual core it is unfortunately the Achilles heal for quads as it really struggles to provide enough juice for a quad & although it can do it the PWM is over stressed & then runs blisteringly hot & therefore needs active cooling which can prove difficult in most peoples cases as its all part of the heatpipe system & its a half moon shape heatsink that makes it very difficult to mount a fan too provided you can even get at it with a decent big CPU heatsink installed.

If you like playing with RAM timings & experimenting lets say from say CL3 DDR700 through to CL5 DDR1200 then again the DFI is your weapon as it will run anything you can type in provided you have the nuts to give your DIMMS the voltage. The Abits timings are super basic with most of the timings the DFI has being hidden from our view in the BIOS. The Abit however does a really good job of getting the most out of your RAM with virtually zero input which again for a plug & play board has the best performance straight out of the box of any board I have to date including the DFI P35.

Hope this helps

CN