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- Date:
- Monday , February 16, 2004
- Author:
- Keith Dugger
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
DFI 865PE-INFINITY
From LANParty bloodlines, the 865PE INFINITY promises to offer similar performance within a value price range. Can the 865PE INFINITY maintain DFI’s fast growing reputation?
BIOS
The trusted Phoenix – AwardBIOS is DFI’s choice for the INFINITY. The main screen shown here offers navigation to all of the submenus and save and exit.
An important and almost hidden feature is the system’s Delay Prior to Thermal setting buried in the Advanced Bios Features – CPU Feature submenu. It would make more sense to put this in the PC Health section, but it is here nonetheless.
Another item of note is the Hard Disk Boot Priority setting. This option includes the standard drive selections, but also allows for settings to boot from USB floppy, ZIP, or CD-ROM devices. This is incredibly useful as I don’t have an internal floppy and only hook up my external USB floppy in case something is wrong. This option will allow a user to boot from an external USB device and perform required maintenance without digging around for that internal floppy drive. Further pushing the BIOS feature envelop, DFI has included another USB setting, the USB Flash Disk Type. This will set a USB flash disk to either HDD or Floppy emulation to allow for a boot should you have a bootable image on your USB flash device.
The Advanced Chipset Features menu gives the user the ability to set DRAM timings. This is the most important subset of this menu.
The following settings are available for DRAM Timings: CAS Latency (2, 2.5, 3); Active to Precharge Delay (5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10); DRAM RAS# to CAS# Delay (2, 3, 4); and DRAM RAS# Precharge (2, 3, 4). These support the most aggressive timings, but may not satisfy a need to go for the loose end of the spectrum. As always, lower settings are the more aggressive. One can also set the Memory Frequency For to force the system to operate at DDR266 or DDR333 speeds. A setting of Auto is default.
The Integrated Peripherals submenu displays available controls options for these devices.
The OnChip IDE Device submenu controls how the IDE drive operate as well as the On-Chip Serial ATA ports. Optional settings here are Disabled; Combined Mode; Enhanced Mode; or SATA Only. In the Onboard Device submenu, DFI offers the options to disable almost every onboard peripheral available. This is useful for those users needing to protect limited IRQ resources.
The PC Health Status submenu details the current environment aspects of the INFINITY. There are not any settings to change here; it is for informational purposes only.
The Genie Bios Settings submenu is home to one of the most important feature sets a BIOS can offer. That is the ability to overclock the system and tweak the voltage. Here one can change the CPU Clock (133 – 255), the CPU Clock Ratio if unlocked (8 – 28), and even overclock the AGP/PCI/SATA buses. I feel much safer setting this to 66/33/100 MHz myself.
Other aspects of the Genie Bios Settings submenu is the often important voltage settings. The CPU Voltage Control has settings from a low of 1.5250V to a high of 1.9750V. This range more than meets the needs for CPU voltage. Next comes the Dimm Voltage Control with available settings from 2.6V – 2.9V. I haven’t found the need for much higher settings than these. Finally, the AGP Voltage Control has a range of 1.5V – 1.8V. More than adequate.
Last on the BIOS list is the CMOS Reloaded feature. This allows the user to save up to four custom BIOS configurations for later use. This ability to backup the BIOS could be more than useful for those overclocking sessions. Here you can Backup, Load, or Rename any of the four user define configurations that you have save. This is a great feature to say the least.
Finally, the INFINITY offers something DFI has branded Super Patch. To quote DFI, “Super Patch is a memory acceleration technology that performs direct data transfer between the CPU and system memory. This significantly shortens latency time and provides improved system performance”. It’s good to see technology like this still floating around for the 865PE. DFI claims an 11.82% increase in memory performance with this feature.