Entrants, Continued

DFI

DFI’s really been going out of their way to entice gamers and hardware enthusiasts. Their LANPARTY series of motherboards were the first to ship with round IDE cables, and also include other goodies such as customizable FRONTX 5.25” front panel bays and a convenient strap for carrying your PC to LAN parties. Not only do these motherboards come with lots of extra features, but they also provide great performance and reliability, with competitive pricing. In fact, the last DFI motherboard we tested, their NFII Ultra Rev B finished ahead of ASUS’ enhanced second generation A7N8X-E Deluxe in our nForce 2 Ultra 400 shootout at the beginning of this year.

DFI LanParty II Ultra Rev. B motherboard

Thermaltake XaserV ATX chassis

DFI chose to use this motherboard for the FiringSquad Invitational. It features an enhanced, 4-channel Serial ATA controller, DualNet networking (Gigabit Ethernet in fact), Dolby Digital 5.1 audio, a handy diagnostic LED display, and DFI’s highly regarded CMOS Reloaded BIOS for overclocking.

The system was encased in a Thermaltake XaserV chassis, and was outfitted with AMD’s Athlon XP 3000+ CPU. Keeping the processor fed with data was 1GB of DDR400 SDRAM while ATI’s RADEON 9800 XT graphics card supplied the visuals.

Gigabyte

Like ASUS, Gigabyte is one of Taiwan’s mega manufacturers, offering a wide array of products that spans from optical storage, keyboards and mice, all the way up to monitors and notebooks.

Among motherboard manufacturers Gigabyte is perhaps best known for their DualBIOS feature, which integrates dual BIOS chips on the motherboard. If one BIOS fails or is corrupted by virus, you simply revert to the backup BIOS to restore your system’s integrity. More recently Gigabyte has made a name for themselves with their dual power system, which is frequently referred to as DPS.

DPS acts as a second power source for your CPU, ensuring that it has a constant supply of juice when overclocking. With faster processors also consuming more power, DPS could arguably be considered an insurance policy towards the future. Whereas most 925X and 915 motherboards are limited to 3-phase or at best 4-phase power solutions, Gigabyte’s DPS-equipped 925/915 boards supply 8 phases of power.

Gigabyte GA-8ANXP-D mainboard

Corsair 1GB XMS2-5400 DDR2 RAM

Gigabyte GV-RX80X256V video card

Gigabyte really decked out the system they submitted to us, starting off with the motherboard, Gigabyte’s GA-8ANXP-D. This is their flagship 925X motherboard with dual Gigabit Ethernet controllers, IEEE-1394b, 802.11g Wi-Fi, support for up to eight Serial ATA hard drives, 3 PCI-E x1 slots and one x16 slot for graphics and Intel’s High Definition 7.1 audio.

In addition to the high-end motherboard, Gigabyte partnered with Corsair, who provided 1 Gigabyte of their brand new XMS2-5400 DDR2 memory. This is pretty high-end stuff folks. For graphics duties, Gigabyte included their PCI Express X800 XT Platinum Edition card, the GV-RX80X256V, while the system was finished off with an LGA-775 Pentium 4 3.2GHz.