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DFI Infinity 865PE (Springdale) Motherboard Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Tuesday, September 23, 2003
Introduction
DFI has been making some rather large leaps into the hardware enthusiast market. The LanParty series has been a huge success both in onboard features like RAID, board mounted power and reset switches, and excellent overclocking controls. From a layout perspective the LanParty series also included features that appeal to the casemodder like UV reactive expansion and memory slots, Black PCB and well planned placement of components that gives the user maximum board usability. This of course doesn't even touch on the included items like UV reactive IDE and Floppy cables, FrontX media bay and the TransPC case-carrying strap. All in all the LanParty series came with everything a gamer could want but had one downfall, the package was rather expensive but justifiably so.
There are very few board manufactures that bundle a large amount of goodies with their product in an attempt to keep the overall cost down. This ultimately translates into a more affordable product for the end user. The one thing that the manufacturer needs to watch out for is that the affordable product still has a rich enough feature set to make it competitive in the market with the performance to back it up.
The Infinity series from DFI is designed to address the cost and goodie issue by giving the high-end users and overclockers a low cost alternative. The series currently consists of 3 high performance chipsets. Which, as of this writing, include the nVidia nForce 2 Ultra, Intel i875P (Canterwood), and the i865PE (Springdale).
For this review we will be looking at the 865PE Infinity board from DFI. This board features a sexy crimson red PCB that actually accentuates the motherboard traces. I find it very pleasing to see a PCB design that actually shows some of the mechanics behind how a board is put together. If you have been reading Ninjalane for some time you will also know I have a very soft spot for sexy red PCBs that dates all the way back to the first motherboard ever reviewed in the Ninja Lane Labs, the Freeway FWD-P3C4XD.
The rest of the layout is pretty self-explanatory and will be illustrated in the pages to come.
