DFI Lanparty DK P45-T2RS Plus

 

Well, it’s time to wrap up the last 9 pages in a few paragraphs and draw some final thoughts on the DK P45-T2RS Plus. In short, the board is a well thought out and cost effective motherboard most suited for 24/7 use. To start with, the layout is pretty much everything you could want, with no silly ATX power connector placement and all the connectors are close to the edge of the board. There’s also plenty of space to fit large air coolers to the CPU. If you wanted to be really picky, you could gripe about the fact that the two PCI-E slots are quite close, which means that running two cards in Crossfire may prove tricky if they have large GPU coolers. Some may find the Clear CMOS jumper to be obscured by the GPU in the first slot as well, but that argument  doesn’t hold much weight given that there is one on the I/O plate which does exactly the same thing.

 

The T2RS’s performance, while not ground breaking, was quite commendable. It held its own against the other boards it was compared too, even beating them in a fair few areas. It showed some muscle in the 3DMark suites and a similar pattern was seen with the two FPS games tested with the T2RS. Although it was by the smallest of margins, the demos showed the T2RS to be the fastest. Overclocking on the DK P45-T2RS was a little disappointing, but I felt this wasn’t entirely the fault of the board as there are ample options and potential.

 

The price for the LP DK T2RS Plus sits in at £114.59 over at Ebuyer at the time of writing, making it a good price point to be considered against the likes of the P5Q-E and EP45-UD3P. In my opinion, it’s a fantastic price for the board. The features you only found on high-end boards a few years ago have trickled down to the mid-range and are on display with the DK P45.

 

The final question about this board is, of course, should you buy it? This depends on a number of factors. If you’re looking for a stable, practical board that has the potential for some good 24/7 overclocks at a decent price then I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the DFI DK P45-T2RS. If you’re looking for bells, whistles, over-sized heatsinks and BIOS features you wouldn’t use without LN2, then you’d do better to look elsewhere.