DFI CA64-EC Motherboard Review

Testbed configuration

First off, to save your time, I'm skipping the Sandra CPU and Media benches. Suffice to say it tests as fast as it should in those benches. Those benches would matter if we were overclocking, but there's no reason to try with this board.  The kicker here is the Memory benchmark.

As you can see, the memory performance is extremely weak. This has been seen time and time again in board reviews of the VIA Apollo Pro 133a chipset. Most manufacturers have learned their lessons here and at least provided the necessary system tweaks in the BIOS to get respectable memory bandwidth performance enabled, but DFI has not. I could use some utilities available, such as WPCREDIT to manually tweak some settings, but I don't really see the average Joe going to the effort on this board with it's limited FSB options.

Quake3Arena v.1.25y Beta Point Release, Timedemo DEMO000

I placed it head to head against the numbers from their DFI AK74-SC SocketA board review...

Nothing surprising here, at least the abysmal memory bandwidth scores in Sandra haven't translated into poor performance here.

Conclusions. 

I'm really lukewarm about this board. I did my usual with it, and left it running Prime95, did a bit of Q3a playing on it, and everything went well. No hardware installation anomalies, mysterious crashes, or anything bad really happened.  Of course that should be expected from ANY board that's at a stock clockrate. Having no real FSB or overclocking options on the board, gave me no real opportunities to really stress it, and test it's mettle. It's clear from both DFI board reviews that I've done here, that DFI is strictly interested in the value OEM market. In that market space, they're still basically average, as most manufacturers have figured out and dealt with the memory performance issues surrounding use of the VIA Apollo Pro 133a chipset. While I'm not trashing the board in this review I feel, there's certainly little to get excited about with the DFI CA64-EC.

Pros:

Cons:

Rating: 6/10

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