On board peripherals



A lot of expansion slots are available, but will they be of any use? Perhaps you’ll need more serial ata ports? A sound card? Perhaps a netword card? Let’s take a look what this board has before we’ll start thinking about expanding it.

At first sight there are no audio ports available. This is due to the fact that DFI adds a little card that needs to be plugged in next to the PS2 ports. It’s called the Karajan audio module.

Karajan audio module - Realtek ALC885 8-channel High Definition Audio CODEC - 6 audio jacks - 1 CD-in connector - 1 front audio connector

DAC SNR/ADC SNR of 106dB/101dB

Full-rate lossless content protection technology

S/PDIF-in/out interface

The board also offers two gigabit network cards. One comes integrated with the Nforce 5 chipset. For the second one DFI added an extra LAN controller chip to create the second port.

NVIDIA® MCP55PXE integrated with Gigabit MAC (Media Access Control) technology

Two Vitesse VSC8601 Gigabit Phy chips

Fully compliant to IEEE 802.3 (10BASE-T), 802.3u (100BASE-TX) and 802.3ab (1000BASE-T) standards

Not only LAN is the only communication interface, there are also two firewire ports.

VIA VT6307

Supports two 100/200/400 Mb/sec ports

You can also connect other devices trough one of the ten USB 2.0 port. Six of these ports are available from the I/O back panel of the mainboard. 4 others can be connected on the mainboard trough a PCI bracket or to the front of your case.

Internally there are also a lot of storage connection possibilities. For starters we have the six SATA ports that are supported by the Nforce 5 chipset, supporting a lot of RAID options.

If that wasn’t enough, DFI added a promise chip to take care of two extra SATA ports. What I’m missing, and what can be found as well on rather budget minded boards is the e-SATA plug. A sata port in the I/O panel to connect directly to an external SATA disk.

Six Serial ATA ports supported by NVIDIA® MCP55PXE - SATA speed up to 3Gb/s - RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and RAID 5

Two Serial ATA ports supported by Silicon Image SiI 3132 - SATA speed up to 3Gb/s - RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 0+1

One IDE connector allows connecting up to two UltraDMA 133Mbps hard drives. Though we have a lot of sata ports present I think a lot of people would like to see the two extra sata ports replaced by one IDE connector instead.

An older hard disk drive and a DVD writer directly use up two IDE ports, now you’re almost forced to change your IDE disks to SATA disks.



Extra features

This board is aiming towards the enthusiast market.

Monitors CPU/system/chipset temperature

Monitors 12V/5V/3.3V/Vcore/Vbat/5Vsb/Vdimm/Vchip voltages

Monitors the speed of the cooling fans

CPU Overheat Protection function monitors CPU temperature during system boot-up

Five fan headers

1 Debug LED. This is a two digit character display. During the POST process it shows a number of codes. If it halts on a specific code you know immediately what part or setting is faulty.

EZ touch switches (power switch and reset switch)

For the less overclocking minded there’s also something; DFI has yet again chosen for a rather colorful board.

Time for some first tests ->