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DFI Infinity 865PE (Springdale) Motherboard Review
Author: Dennis Garcia
Published: Tuesday, September 23, 2003
Board Layout and Features
The heart of every motherboard is the chipset. The chipset makes sure that all of the hardware components can talk to each other and control the basic features that are included on a particular motherboard. In the case of the i865PE two chips make up the i865PE chipset and include the standard Northbridge and Southbridge. I somewhat broke with tradition for this review and didn't removed the Northbridge heatsink. 
The Southbridge is the standard ICH5 that is found on most Springdale boards, the Southbridge supports Serial ATA but has no RAID feature.
The Southbridge is the standard ICH5 that is found on most Springdale boards, the Southbridge supports Serial ATA but has no RAID feature.
The power supply on the 865PE Infinity appears to be the same one found on the LanParty Pro875 just in a different location. The design is using a traditional 3-phase Mosfet system.
There isn't really anything special about the CPU socket, though we have noticed that more and more ICs are making it into the processor cage space. You will also notice two 3-pin fan headers located towards the bottom of the picture marked CPU fan and NB/2nd fan. I must applaud DFI for thinking ahead; even though the board comes with a passive Northbridge cooling solution they are providing a convenient upgrade path for anyone wishing to move to an active cooling solution.
There isn't really anything special about the CPU socket, though we have noticed that more and more ICs are making it into the processor cage space. You will also notice two 3-pin fan headers located towards the bottom of the picture marked CPU fan and NB/2nd fan. I must applaud DFI for thinking ahead; even though the board comes with a passive Northbridge cooling solution they are providing a convenient upgrade path for anyone wishing to move to an active cooling solution.
As with most Springdale motherboards this board features dual channel DDR400 with color-coded slots to represent the two banks in each channel. IDE, Floppy, and ATX power connectors are located right next to the memory slots. I am somewhat split on the decision to place all of these in this particular location. One part of me says, "not a big deal, this isn't the first time for this sort of thing" and the other part of me says, "Great lets get this stuff up and out of the way, better things are to come". There will be more on this aspect later.
The expansion slot area on the 865PE Infinity is actually very compact and littered with connectors and headers. You may be able to guess what most of the connectors are but just for sanity sake, Yellow = USB, white (towards the bottom) = iEEE1394, game port across the bottom, WOL, and audio ports along the left and bottom. The locations and purposes are all documented in the user manual.
