DFI does Dothan for gamers and modders

By Steve Malone

Posted on 5 Nov 2004 at 10:09

Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer, DFI, has launched a motherboard aimed squarely at the gaming and enthusiast community but who like to think of themselves as environmentally aware.

The 855GME-MGF is based on the Intel mobile 855GME/6300 ESB chipset with support for low power Pentium M (formerly Dothan) processors. The board is built to a micro ATX design and supports socket 479 Pentium M and Celeron M processors with either a 90nm Dothan or the 130nm Banias core.

DFI says that the 855GME-MGF BIOS offers an adjustable CPU clock (100 to 250MHz), adjustable CPU ratio (six to infinite), adjustable FSB to memory ratio (1:1, 4:3, 5:3), asynchronized PCI/AGP modes (33/66, 36/73, 40/80), and built in stability testing for both memory and CPU.

Interestingly, the company claims that an overclocked 2.8GHz Pentium M processor actually outperforms an Athlon64 4000+ and Pentium 4 3.4GHz Extreme Edition running a Doom3 based benchmark.

The board is going on sale in the US from 8 November. No European date has been set yet.

In a separate announcement DFI says that a DFI owner 'Fugger' using phase change managed to overclock his unmodified DFI LANParty 875P-T motherboard with a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 (LGA 775) processor to 6.3GHz. It was not mentioned whether 'Fugger' managed to melt the CPU in the process.