Despite having three full PCI-express 16x lane slots
the board will not support three-way SLI, however
three-way CrossFire works just fi ne and as one would
expect. Just note that making use of three two-slot
graphics adapters will use up all the board real
estate. SATA connectors are placed at the edge of the
motherboard and parallel to the board’s horizontal
which makes access easy even with particularly long
VGA cards installed. Six of the connectors are courtesy
of the ICH10R controller while the other two come
from the JMicron JMB363 controller. As we have come
to expect from DFI, this board also includes the EXswitch
for power and reset buttons. A post LED is also
included as per usual. While the board does not make
use of a BIOS redundancy system, it does have a
unique system that makes it easy to remove the BIOS
chip itself.
One of the easiest
X58 based motherboard
to overclock.
Aesthetically it’s what one has come to expect from
DFI, with green and yellow UV reactive slots. The T3eH6
won’t win any beauty awards but it does have a better
colour scheme than other boards in the price range.
The BIOS is the usual DFI affair with more options than
most people will know what to do with or understand,
Test Platform
Processor: Intel Core i7 940
RAM: OCZ Platinum DDR3 Triple
Channel PC12800 Set (3GB)
VGA: Asus ENGTX295
PSU: IKONIK VULCAN 1200W
THE LAB
but the basic settings are easily accessible and one can
overclock successfully without ever touching the moreadvanced
settings.
As with all boards of this calibre though, it all comes
down to overclocking and this is the one area where
the T3eH6 was particularly impressive. Overclocking a
particularly poor Core i7 sample was far easier than it’s
ever been on any other board. With the CPU multiplier
set to 19x we were able to set the Bclk to 200MHz and
the board booted fi rst time. It was completely stable
with all eight threads enabled. Unfortunately though,
going over 205MHz proved to be near impossible
but our CPU has previously proved very diffi cult to
overclock. That said, the T3eH6 is the only motherboard
we’ve tested that has managed to clock this CPU to
4GHz, with all others not able to push the CPU above
3,800MHz or so.
There were reports of some initial BIOS issues but
we had no such problems. Of the cheaper X58 based
motherboards on the market, it’s one of the better
performing ones. It has everything most people would
need and comes in at a very-reasonable price. The DFI
T3eH6 is defi nitely a motherboard worth purchasing.
Neo Sibeko.
RATING8/10
Verdict Good X58 board for a reasonable amount
of money.
WWW.THEOVERCLOCKER.COM 33
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