DFI

Those reading who are used to seeing LanParty products and expecting to see a similar level of product here will be disappointed. The infinity series is a more budget conscious range of products. With that said, let’s look at the offering…the Infinity 975X/G comes in a reasonably small box which gives some of the main features on the front.

Turning the box over reveals further product info though it is not as detailed as other motherboards in the same price bracket.

If used to an Asus or Abit product the contents of the above box will be somewhat of a disappointment. DFI have gone for the bare minimum here and all that we find is the backplate, a single IDE cable, 2 SATA cables the floppy drive cable, a HD power connector and the software/manual.

The board itself is quite distinct. Rather than going down the same route as many other manufacturers and using a black PCB DFI have gone for a rather retro green PCB. We can’t remember the last time we saw a high end board in green, not that this is necessarily a bad thing.

There are two aspects of the DFI design which struck us as being good. The first is that the mixture of PCIE and PCI slots is about right. The Abit board on the previous pages only has 1 PCI slot which really does cause issues if being used next to a high end PCI audio card and PCI wireless card. There are still far more PCI based products out there and in most systems PCIe 1x slots just go to waste. DFI have also made a good decision placing one of the slots above the 1st 16x PCIE slot so that the connector is never “taken out” by a larger graphics card cooler. The second design aspect which appealed to us was the placement of the IDE and SATA connectors. As with most modern boards there is only 1 IDE connector and rather than place it on the edge of the board facing out which can cause issues in some compact cases DFI have the IDE connector facing upwards. The SATA connectors (4) are also in an area of the board that reduces any connectivity issues if a larger graphics card is installed.

Heatsinks on the Infinity 975X/G are extremely diverse. On the northbridge we have a standard metal design where as the southbridge is covered by a stone type block. Unique would be an understatement. Additionally, not far from the stone heatsink is DFI’s own version of the restart and power buttons we saw on the Ab5t board previously.

DFI have not skimped on the external connectivity and in addition to the mostly unneeded serial and parallel ports we have everything most people will require. 2 PS/2 ports, coaxial and optical digital out, SATA out, firewire, 4xUSB, 1 Gb Lan and analog sound.

Like Abit, DFI use Phoenix Award bios for their 975 based board. Initial inspection of the DFI configuration impressed us in the overclocking options available. The CPU and chipset options cater for most users though this is another board where X6800s do not have upward multipliers available. Voltage options are very good though with 2.65 available on the Memory setting and in excess of 1.35v available via CPU voltage options which reach +725.5mV.

Possibly the most impressive aspect of the DFI bios would have to be the memory configuration screen. There are so many timing options available we guarantee that most users won’t even have a clue what many of them mean. It’s a real novelty to have access to these settings and a great selling point too.

DFI Software

Considering the configuration options available in the bios we had expected to find some software bundled which would allow us to take control of the board within windows however this proved not to be the case. DFI bundle a basic monitoring tool which allows you to view some very basic readings and to be honest the tool looks like it’s been written by an college kid. Thankfully a few 3rd party tools support this product so all is not lost.