Every enthusiast's favorite motherboard manufacturer, DFI, had three new P45 motherboards on display and the good news is that the first model should be available before the end of the month. DFI is generally quite late to market, but it seems like they've managed to improve upon this for once.
The three boards are the P45-T2RS, yes, they all have the same model name, but the prefix is what matters, as this is what separates the boards. So we've got the Lanparty UT, Lanparty DK and finally, the Lanparty JR, which are the new range of boards.
Starting at the top with the UT, it uses the typical green and yellow color scheme and the board doesn't look that different from the P35 version. There are some minor tweaks, but the real difference is that this board actually has real support for CrossFireX thanks to a pair of x16 PCIe 2.0 slots, of course, with x8 bandwidth per slot.
The DK follows the same pattern as the UT, although in this case there isn't a straight DK predecessor and as such ends up replacing the LT series P35 board. Again, it has a pair of x16 PCIe 2.0 slots with the same limitations. The DK is more of a high-end consumer version compared to the UT, which is targeting the more advanced users.
Finally, we have the JR or Junior. which is an entirely new series of Lanparty board and for the first time ever, DFI has done a mATX Lanparty product. This P45 board allows for CrossFireX to be used and the two x16 PCIe 2.0 slots are locked in x8 mode due to PCB space limitations. However, with PCIe 2.0 having twice the bandwidth of PCIe 1.0, this shouldn't be a cause for concern.
The board also has a x1 PCIe slot and a standard PCI slot for expansion and as you can see from the picture it has heatpipe cooling and the same color scheme as the DK series. Around the back are two PS/2 ports, optical and coaxial S/PDIF, a BIOS reset jumper, six USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1-channel audio jacks.
The board also has four memory slots for DDR2 memory, six SATA ports and an IDE connector and headers for six additional USB 2.0 ports. We really like this nifty little board and we'd expect it to become a solid favorite with people who actually attend LAN parties.
DFI also added a new BIOS feature, genius BIOS, which allows you to overclock your system without touching anything in the BIOS. It's as simple as pressing a button at boot-up and the motherboard will do the rest of it for you.
