DFI

Ever since former ABIT employee Scott Thirwell moved over to DFI, their vocus has almost moved completely from the OEM market to the enthusiast market. All of their recent motherboards feature plenty of BIOS overclocking adjustments and their board layout and package contents have become much more enthusiast-friendly.

DFI were lucky enough to have the first and only working ClawHammer sample we have seen so far at Computex. All of the others were non-working mechanical samples brought in just for the show. Unfortunately, we could not persuade DFI into letting us "borrow" the CPU for benchmarking, so we took a picture instead.

DFI had both 850E and SiS648 Pentium 4 motherboards on display at their booth. The SiS648 board (NS80) features AGP 8x, 6-channel audio, 10/100 LAN and six USB 2.0 ports, while the slightly plainer 850E board (NT72) features 1066 RDRAM support, 10/100 LAN, AC97 audio, AGP 4x and ATA100 support.

Like most of the motherboard manufacturers at Computex, DFI had an AMD 8151 based ClawHammer motherboard on display, called the HA80. It features both ATA133 and SerialATA, IEEE1394 ports, 6-channel audio and DDR333 support.

As well as an AMD chipset based ClawHammer board, DFI had their VIA K8HT ClawHammer motherboard on display as well, called the HK80. The board includes all of the same features as the HA80, so it will be very interesting to see which chipset is the better of the two.

DFI also had a Serial ATA hard drive on display at their stand. This is the same model as the drives we have seen at the other motherboard manufacturer's booths and as you can see from the images below, the drive has been manufactured by Fujitsu. Now that SerialATA boards have been released, it won't be long before hard drive manufacturers follow suit with SerialATA hard drives.