DFI displays use ultra violet to good effect

DFI HAD BY FAR the brightest, most colourful mobo display at Computex. The wall of Lanparty boards that we posted a pic of a few days ago shone under UV light. No major shock there, they are all UV sensitive, and while they they are bright under normal light, UV makes them come alive.

The highest end of the line is the Intel based s775 Lanparty 925X-T2 board and the nF3 Ultra-D for AMD. Both have all the usual Lanparty goodies, but don't stop there, they go beyond where most manufacturers stop. The boring stuff is a Marvell based Gb NIC and two extra USB ports. Even the lowly i915 based 915P-T model gets them.

The fun stuff is the audio. All three of the new Lanparty boards get Karajan eight channel audio, even the Intel ones. They forgo the Intel 7.1 solution for their own. It, and its attendant superior noise reduction capabilities require a separate daughter card, you can see it just past the audio plugs. While it was just about impossible to hear the person standing next to you on the show floor, it was flat out impossible to evaluate an audio solution with anything more than a 'yes, I can hear something'. You can see the card sticking up between the sound ports and the IDE cable.

Additionally, the Lanparty boards are fully compliant with the latest Intel voltage specs, and can support all s775 variants with ease. I guess DFI must have been burned by the leaking caps problem a year ago because it went to great lengths to impress upon me the quality of the capacitors in this board. Seeing as how it is a pretty high end gaming board, I would assume they are quite good.

The last really nice touch is an extra PCI-E 1x slot in the front of the case. Opposite where the normal PCI-E slots are, basically in the front of the case, you have another PCI-E 'internal' slot. This one is meant for things that don't need a cable routed to the outside, things like SATA RAID cards would go well here. Again, like the rest of the Lanparty features, it is a nice touch.

Next up is something I was not expecting from DFI, but if you think about it, it fits in well, 5.1 channel headphones. The DFI Quake51 headphones have six chambers for 'true' surround sound, and when I tried them, they were pretty good. They come with a USB decoder, just plug it in and run. If you want to use them as normal headphones, just don't use the decoder, and you are set. I can say they sounded good enough for the show floor, and felt pretty comfortable to me. The Quake51s should retail for about $80 when they come out.

Last up was the new set of SFF barebones systems. I did not get any time with them, but they have one unique feature, a Bluetooth transmitter. No other SFF box I saw at the show had this, and like the Quake51s, it compliments the new DFI-HBT101 Bluetooth headset. It is almost like it planned it that way. µ