PCB Design and Functionality

DFI LANPARTY DK X58-T3eH6 looks quite traditionally: the layout is close to classical, all color connectors should glow in UV light.

The top part of DFI LANPARTY DK X58-T3eH6 PCB is practically ideal: there is enough room around the processor socket for large CPU coolers; the six-phase processor voltage regulator circuitry, just like the rest of the board, uses only solid-state capacitors; PATA and power connectors are very conveniently located; there are six DDR3 DIMM slots onboard.

Speaking of the lower part of the DFI LANPARTY DK X58-T3eH6 PCB we have to draw your attention to the cooling system. The chipset South Bridge is topped with a small heatsink that is fastened with plastic spring push-pins. A massive heatsink over the chipset North Bridge is connected to a large heatsink on the voltage regulator MOSFET with a heatpipe. These two are mounted using reliable screw-on retention.

The bottom part of DFI LANPARTY DK X58-T3eH6 PCB has three PCI Express 2.0 x16 graphics card slots. Two green slots can work at full speed, while the yellow slot can only provide PCI Express 2.0 x4 speed. Moreover, there are two regular PCI slots and one PCI Express x4 slot. There are two power connectors delivering additional power to PCI Express x16 slots when high-performance graphics cards are installed. They look like floppy power connectors.

As for the drives, the board is equipped with eight Serial ATA connectors that also support RAID. Six of them are implemented in Intel ICH10R South Bridge, and another two together with a PATA connector supporting up to two devices – via an additional JMicron JMB363 controller. The mainboard features six fan connectors and has a pin-connector for a COM port.

Among the peculiarities of DFI LANPARTY DK X58-T3eH6 board we have to point out two barely noticeable buttons: Power On and Reset. By pressing them both at the same time you can reset the BIOS parameters back to their nominal values. There is also a POST indicator and an unusually large number of jumpers. Among them  there is a group called “CPU FSB Select” that allows setting a startup frequency, but the available choices including FSB 800, FSB 1066 and FSB 1333 are of no real practical value. Another group called “CPU VTT Select” seems much more interesting, as it allows increasing this voltage from the nominal 1.2 V to 1.4 V or even 1.6 V.

By the way, a little below SATA connectors we found a group of contact spots with typical markings: “CPU”, “CPU VTT”, “CPU PLL”, “DRAM”, etc. We believe that they can be used to monitor the corresponding mainboard voltages using a special tester device.

We have already seen similar voltage control implementations on Foxconn BloodRAGE and EVGA X58 SLI Classified mainboards. However, there is no mention of this feature in DFI LANPARTY DK X58-T3eH6 manual. Anyway, we are going to dwell on the supporting documents and material later in this review.

The mainboard connector panel has almost all ports and connectors a contemporary mainboard should have. The only one missing is probably the eSATA. The ClearCMOS jumper is only convenient to work with if the board is on a test stand, otherwise a button would be way better. There are the following connectors:

• PS/2 keyboard and mmouse connector;
• Optical and coaxial S/PDIF as well as six audio-jacks implemented via high-quality eight-channel Realtek ALC889 HD codec;
• ClearCMOS jumper;
• Gigabit network port implemented via Marvell 88E8053 controller;
• One IEEE1394 port (the second port is available in the form of an onboard pin-connector) provided by VIA VT6308P;
• Six USB ports (the remaining six can be connected to the onboard pin-connectors).

You can get a better idea of the location of different mainboard components by looking at the layout from the mainboard user manual:

We are going to wind up this part of our review with a detailed list of technical specs from the official manufacturer's web-site:

DFI LANPARTY DK X58-T3eH6 doesn’t belong to the most known DFI solutions from elite “LANPARTY UT” or “LANPARTY LT” series, but everything about it, including the attention to details reveals no restrictions of any kind. On the contrary, the board seems to be perfectly balanced in terms of features and some of its components are extremely well put together. Some drawbacks such as the absence of eSATA ports, not the best location for the FDD connector, identical Power On and Reset buttons and a Clear CMOS jumper instead of a button on the back panel are pretty minor and should merely be pointed out, but  not really focused upon.