Closer Look

This mainboard is a full-featured product. It supports processors with 400MHz FSB in the first hand, so owners of top-end Athlon XPs won’t have any problems with it. This is only due to the new North Bridge: older mainboards would only support 333MHz FSB frequency.

If you are into manual tweaking of your hardware, you may find the two small buttons on the PCB very useful. They are Power and Reset.

There is a Silicon Image Sil3114 controller and four SerialATA connectors nearby. They allow building RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 arrays. As we have already mentioned several times in our previous articles, this controller from Silicon Image is not a hardware RAID controller: everything is implemented on the software level. Anyway, the speed of this solution is pretty high.

Note also that DFI gave up serving its exclusive dish: RAID 1.5 array. RAID 1.5 is in fact a modification of RAID 1 concept. With RAID 1, we have all data on one drive, while the other drive stores their copy. With RAID 1.5, we have half of the data stored on the first drive, and the other half on the second; the data are mirrored on the vacant half of the other drive. This solution was based on HighPoint 372N controller, which was the only one to offer this feature. Although RAID 1.5 is slightly faster than RAID 1, the lack of compatibility (you can’t read a RAID 1.5 array on a mainboard without the HighPoint controller) must have made this solution unpopular.

There are two network controllers on the mainboard: MCP-T South Bridge together with ICS1893 Phy chip provides Fast Ethernet (100Mbit/s), and Realtek RTL8110S controller gives you Gigabit Ethernet (1Gbit/s).

The mainboard boasts numerous I/O ports to connect external devices: 4 USB 2.0/1.1 ports, 2 FireWire ports, 1 COM, 1 LPT, PS/2 ports for the mouse and keyboard, S/PDIF connectors (input and output), line-out, line-in and mic-in jacks and two audio connectors for attaching the speakers (center/bass and rear out). The PCB also carries 2 USB and 1 FireWire connector that can be attached to the FrontX panel and an infrared port. This abundance of connectors should satiate every need of the most demanding user.

Like many other products, the DFI mainboard comes equipped with a six-channel AC’97 Realtek ALC650 codec. Although the chip has always been good, it is an out-dated solution already. Considering numerous innovations from Realtek, Analog Devices and VIA Technologies available in the market, it is strange that DFI implemented an older audio solution in its high-end mainboard.

If any hardware problems arise, the small diagnostics system may help. It consists of four onboard LEDs.

On the one hand, many mainboards come without any diagnostic tools, so it is nice we have one here, but on the other hand, a top-end mainboard might have been equipped with a small indicator of POST codes, which seems more optimal in this case.