DFI Lanparty Pro875-B

Highly Commended - Personal Computer World

Creating an inconspicuous motherboard was obviously not at the top of DFI's agenda when it devised the Lanparty Pro875-B. Its bright orange and green fixtures are likely to appeal to case modders, especially because of the colours' reactivity to ultraviolet (UV)light.

The accompanying bundle contains UV-reactive IDE cables, Sata power adapters and mounting accessories including the distinctive FrontX Media Kit. The latter provides an alternative to blanking plates by redirecting LED, USB and audio connectors to a front-facing 5.25in drive bay. Useful as it is, the money invested here would have been better spent elsewhere, as most modern cases provide this functionality.

The motherboard itself is commendable. Based on Intel's Canterwood 875P chipset, it has a quad-pumped 200-400MHz FSB adjustable in 1MHz increments. This gives great scope for upgrading, a fact reinforced with the Cmos Reloaded feature embedded in the Bios. This stores a number of user-defined Bios configurations that can be activated or deactivated depending on your needs.

The Highpoint parallel ATA Raid Controller supports the relatively unproven 'Raid 1.5' standard that aims to combine the best features of Raid 0 and 1 configurations with just two drives. One benefit of this is that one large disk can be created from separate devices, complete with data redundancy should either of them fail.

Aside from the lack of a Firewire port, the rest of the board is fairly standard. Where it excels is in value for money. At just £110.58, it is around £30 cheaper than other 875P-based motherboards here, but its Bios had to be updated to support our 3.2GHz Prescott CPU. This aside, its considerable overclocking ability, makes the Lanparty a deserving recipient of this group test's second Highly Commended award.

Contact: DFI 01375 397 220
www.lanparty.com.tw

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