Board layout



As you can see the board has 2 regular PCI slots and 1 PCI-X slot. Everything is rather compact and makes for a tight fit

The layout at the back has the regular connectors (PS/2, parallel port, serial port, ..) plus 4* USB ports, 1* Firewire and a VGA connector for the onboard video adapter. This board supports 6.1 sound. The line-in and microphone connector can be used for connecting subwoofer and rear speakers.




Installing the CPU and heatsink

Once the CPU is mounted in the socket, the screw has to be turned so the CPU can’t come loose.



Although the CPU is boxed, there’s no cooler in the package. DFI luckily supplies one with the motherboard. It’s a small heatsink with a 40 mm fan on it, you can compare it to an oversized chipset cooler.



The heatsink is secured with the use of this back plate:



The included fan is small, and moderately noisy, 29dBA at 6500rpm (according to specs) pushing 0.17 m³/min or 6 cfm.



Everything is good accessible once installed. Although I had to unplug my SATA cable to reach the "Clear CMOS" jumper. But that’s not the end of the world, is it. :)





The Thermalright XP-120 heatsink dwarfs the whole Dothan setup

Let’s move on to exploring the BIOS settings DFI provided and do some overclocking ->