The normal cause is ram rated to run at over 1.8v, ie 2.1v.

The way round this is to boot with some cheap ram rated at 1.8v.

Go into bios and set the Vdimm to the rating of the ram you want to use, save and exit, then shut the board down and install your normal ram.

Its lazy ram fabs not programming the rams SPD to JDEC standards.

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All in all, its well priced, well featured, great looking and it can be very stable.

No additional fans were used the north bridge, south bridge and PWM heatsinks were all left passive, apart from the airflow from the Zalman CNPS9700 CPU fan.

The system held out just fine, so we looped 3DMark06 over the top of it and came back a day later to find it was still running all the programs and was still responsive a great result.

We had previously had problems when running a quad-core Core 2 Extreme processor when we tested the DFI during our XFX nForce 790i Ultra SLI review it was generally very unstable running just stock speeds and optimised memory timings.

The latest BIOS seems to have fixed this though as our board works perfectly now.

Value We found the DFI LANParty LT X48 T2R for a very reasonable 155.88 (including VAT).

Considering the Asus Rampage Formula and Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 we reviewed last week are 20 more expensive, the DFI certainly looks great value for an enthusiast.

However the Asus Maximus Formula has dropped in price because of the Rampage and now undercuts the DFI by a few pounds.

Given the choice though, the DFI looks better, features a newer chipset and is likely to have better community support for beta BIOSes.

In fact, the Asus board is probably the best match to the DFI they both feature enthusiast-orientated BIOSes with plenty of tweaking options and come with some pretty crazy hardware extras.

While DFI probably has the edge in the former, Asus generally gives you more bits in the box.

Other enthusiast products include the nForce 790i Ultra SLI, which is 80 more expensive but features support for the more popular Nvidia SLI technology instead of the ATI CrossFire support that comes as part of the X48 chipset.

It is worth noting that the DFI LANParty X38 T2R is some 15 cheaper though the basic BIOS for both are very similar, although Id guess not entirely interchangeable.

The board layout and features are identical though its simply one chipset swapped out for another.

If thats still too expensive there is the LANParty DK X38-T2R which features normal CPU power phases instead of the digital ones and is just 120.

Theres very little between the X38 and X48 chipsets, you generally pay a premium for the newer model with the latest revision.

Personally, Id go for the X48 just because Id want the latest bit of kit, but its a hard justification when that 15 could be spent on a better heatsink for example its the difference between something decent and a Thermalright Ultra eXtreme 120.

Final Thoughts For a DDR2 board the gaming performance is very good, outperforming even the Nvidia nForce 780i SLI board in all of our gaming tests.

It cant keep up with the DDR3 boards, but buying 4GB of DDR2 is still a fraction of the cost of even 2GB of DDR3 that alone will offer significant headroom for games as well.

It is more expensive than its X38 brethren and youd be hard pressed to tell the two apart if they were standing side by side.

However, if you were concerned about price youll probably want to wait for the P45 launch anyway.

Its not power friendly either, but DFI has never claimed to even care its not about the latest bandwagon, its about being true to its core, of which it does in spades.

Dfi Lanparty X38 Free To Replace

The incredible north bridge heatsink and its simple interchangeability is no greater example of this youre free to replace it with anything you like because they are no heatpipes.

If you love your DFI boards then youll be onto a winner with the LANParty LT X48 T2R everything you need out of Intels X48 chipset is provided and theres a lot of fun and time investment to be had with it.

After talking to BIOS engineers and others in DFIs QA team, the limitations weve been finding are essentially chipset level and theres plenty of beta BIOS out there to try on DFI communities that only add to its true, core-enthusiast appeal.

Dfi Lanparty X38 Manual With More

However finding these places and knowing who to ask isnt the most obvious thing on earth DFI should fill its manual with more BIOS details, overclocking tips and support forum links for new DFI owners can dive into.

Dfi Lanparty X38 Drivers