DFI
DFI has developed a cult following with their extremely tweakable and highly overclockable motherboards in recent years, but they also have the goal of getting back to the standard enthusiast as well.
This first board is the LanParty UT NF590 SLI board that has a couple of interesting feature twists.
First up, under the CPU socket you won’t see the normal barrage of capacitors and MOSFETs, instead you’ll see these above. Using the ASIC shown and the digital components, DFI is able to perform the same functions as the caps and MOSFETs without the reliability issues that have plagued those analog devices for some time.
Also unique is the placement of the SATA connections on the board; they face out away from the side of the motherboard, much like we have seen IDE and floppy connectors do in some configurations. This should help keep the clutter on the boards to a minimum.
Interestingly, DFI had an NVIDIA reference design of the 590 SLI chipset for the Intel platform on display, working with SLI mode. The card on the display called this the LanParty UT NF590 SLI-T2R/G, with support for Core 2 Duo processors and DDR2-800 memory speeds.
DFI has a 975x board in the works that will support CrossFire with the new Core 2 Duo processors. It is mainly a mainstream product though based on the features we see on it.
Finally, DFI’s Radeon XPress 3200 chipset motherboard was on display, featuring true X16 CrossFire support and the AM2 processors.
