The RDX200 CF-DR looks similar to a lot of the motherboards in the DFI line up with the yellow and orange theme seen throughout the motherboard. The general overall look of the motherboard is nice.
The ATI Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire chipset is cooled by same cooler that is used on majority of the current DFI motherboards. It sits low and cools well. There really isn’t much more you could ask for.
Moving down to the PCI Express configuration we can see our 2x longer 16x PCI Express slots for our graphics cards which run at 8x electronically, a slower PCI Express 1x slot and 3 PCI slots. We have a good combination here of PCI/PCIE slots.
The top of the board shows our 4x DDR memory slots, our 939 socket along with our 24 pin power connector and smaller 8 pin EPS power connector above.
Moving to the side of the motherboard we can see all the ports that are provided by the motherboard. We have our two PS2 ports that we have come so accustom to, next to that we have two Coaxial SPIDF connectors, six USB 2 ports are provided on the motherboard, a single firewire port and two gigabit network ports.
Moving back on to the motherboard we move across to the bottom left of the board which is extremely busy. Here we see our passively cooled ATI SB450 southbridge, 8 x SATA ports with 4 being provided by the Silicon Image controller which can also be seen here. We have a small built in speaker, our extremely useful EZ touch buttons and our main headers for connecting your case power button, reset and etc.
Moving to the upper right hand corner of the board we mentioned before that the 24 pin connector is located here. It comes with a sticker covering it which gives you three different PC setups along with a recommended power supply for that setup. Above the 24 Pin connecter we have an 8 pin EPS connector. You do need to have the 8 pin EPS connector plugged in to get the motherboard to post so it is important that you check your power supply has this connector on it.
The motherboard layout is great and is really nice to setup. No plugs get in the way when it comes to air flow so it really is a very flawless design. The only thing we can’t stress enough is that you do need to have an EPS power supply to get the board to post. The same is with the SLI-DR Expert model from DFI. This offers a better supply of power to the system.
