Design
The DFI P2XBL has 4 PCI, 3 ISA slots and one AGP slot. I think that instead of this
they could have removed one ISA slot and added a PCI slot. Who actually needs 3 ISA slots
today? Not me anyway.
There are 3 fan connectors on this board and that is a great feature that I have missed
on some of the boards that I have tested. Now I can use both my CPU fans and the one for
my graphics card. There is just one problem with that and that is that the CPU slot is
just a little bit to close to some of the capacitors and I had some problems getting the
second heatsink to my processor in place. But I got it working after a few modifications.
You guys that only use one CPU heatsink for your processor shouldn’t have any
problems at all with this. Most of you that use 2 heatsinks for the processor might not
have this problem as it was just one or two millimetres that was the problem for me and my
large heatsink.
All the other needed connectors like the FDD, HDD, Power and various LED connectors are
all easily accessible as they are located in front of the board and you won’t have
any problem with them. It is also good to know that there is a orange colored heatsink
over the 440BX chipset. This helps to dissipate heat better and is even better if you have
overclocked the board.
There is 3 DIMM slots on-board the P2XBL and that should be adequate for most users
needs.
The 3 DIMM slots eliminate the need for any external DRAM Data Buffers and the 13
capacitors on the motherboard account for this board’s stability. The P2XBL is
configured via the use of a Dip Switch block so that you can change the clock multiplier.
The Dip Switch is also placed so that you can easy reach it and changing the setting on it
was easy to do when the motherboard was in place. The Bus speed is auto configured by the
bios but you can also change it in the setup.
