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| DFI 855GME-MGF and Intel Pentium M 735 Along came a Dothan | |
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(Review by MS, Jan 2, 2005) |
DFI 855GME MGF
The board we are looking at is DFI's 855GME-MGF, a µATX board without any bells and whistles with respect to hardware and just a few options in the BIOS. The main improvement over the original design appears to be the scalablility of the PSB, which, in a way is not too surprising since a number of notebook mainboards use the same feature already as part of their power management. Needless to say that going beyond 133 MHz does require soe extra tuning of timing parameters, which DFI appears ti have mastered more or less successfully. What is missing almost completely are any kinds of voltage adjustments, the VID of the CPU can be changed but that is about as far as things go with the limitation of 1.34 V at the highest setting. Even less enticing is the complete lack of memory voltage adjustments, since the board officially not even supports DDR400, the nominal VDD / VDDQ voltages are at 2.5V, which in reality resulted in 2.57V as measured directly at the VDD pins of the memory components.
Two views of the DFI 855 GME MGF board - a wolf in sheep's clothes. The integrated graphics suggest that the board might not exactly be a race horse, but we'll have some benchmarks to prove otherwise. A two-phase VRM without any additional power-connectors in addition to the standard ATX 20-pin socket - it's been awhile since we last saw anything like that. The ubiquitous VIA VT6307 IEEE 1394 Firewire controller.
The 855 GME MGF mainboard features two DDR DIMM slots, each of which is capable of handling 1GB modules, some restrictions regarding the chip configuration apply, though. On-board sound is provided by the Realtek ALC655 audio CODEC that is compatible with the AC'97 audio unit embedded in the 6300ESB I/O controller hub. It is not exactly high definition audio but certainly suffices for the casual user.
The bundle shipping with the 855 GME MGF is similarly pedestrian but it suffices. Key element here is probably the little heatsink-fan unit.
The heatsink-fan combo used on the Dothan compared to that used on the latest iteration of Prescott.
All in all, neither the board nor the bundle don't appear to be anything to write home about but that is not what we are concerned with in the following.
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Pentium M 735 (Dothan 1.7 GHz) |
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