Motherboard

DFI has gone for the full sized 30x24cm ATX layout on a stylish black six layer PCB. DFI has gone all out with regards to its connector placement, even for its budget board. The 24-pin power connector, IDE, SATA and FDD port all line up along the right hand edge of the board. The FDD and SATA ports are rotated 90 degrees to the board, allowing you to install large graphics cards and not have to loose any SATA or parallel ports. The 8-pin aux power connector is located just in front of the memory slots, away from the CPU area, making it one of the cleanest value board layouts we have seen, commendations to DFI for that.

One thing we didn't really care for was the Northbridge heatsink. It is also 90 degrees to the board in between the two layers of the NB heatsink; unfortunately it is held in with only two screws and rattles something terrible inside the case, a very annoying sound to say the least.

The layout around the CPU is clean and tidy, no large capacitors sticking up to take up valuable real estate, especially if you want to run large heatsinks or water cooling setups, these take a bit of room up. DFI has gone for a six phase voltage regulation system, one of the highest we have seen of any value board out there - DFI must be hoping to get some overclocking out of this board.

DFI hasn't changed its rear I/O port arrangement on the Infinity series for some time. The big notes are the SPDIF RCA ports for Digital Audio in and Out, a must have for the digital home these days.

Lastly it's down to the expansion slots that come with the board. Since this board does not support any form of SLI there is only a single PCI Express x16 slot for graphics. Two PCI Express x1 slots and three PCI legacy slots are what this board is packed with. There is a VIA PCI based Firewire chip but that's all you get in extra onboard features.