The LANParty group
DFI's decision to focus on the enthusiast was to go it at full bore, to topple the incumbent leader in the industry, at that time abit, by engineering a range of motherboards that offered all of abit's legendary tweaking and then to add a healthy dollop of additional adjustments that are the hallmarks of the LANParty series. It won't surprise you to learn that Jarry worked for abit on its Canterwood IC7 motherboard before being lured to DFI.This article was originally supposed to show a number of SMT (Surface-Mount Technology) machines and how DFI goes about manufacturing a motherboard, but you've seen that before, countless times, so yours truly thought it would be a better idea to covertly nip down to the room where the entire LANParty operation is based and let you in on some of the behind-the-scenes magic.
Now, it's common knowledge that ASUS' motherboard engineering team runs into the hundreds. MSI's has roughly the same complement and other manufacturers who produce multi-million motherboards a year devote a small, but not wholly dissimilar, number to their respective teams.
The LANParty range is limited to a few chipsets and SKUs but we still expected to see a sizeable team working on present and upcoming boards. After all, most self-respecting enthusiasts will wait to hear details regarding DFI's interpretation before committing to a high-end motherboard based on a particular chipset.
Including the aforementioned Jarry Chang who's not in the picture, this is the entire LANParty team, which comprises of just 4 people. That's right; DFI's industry-leading LANParty division could all fit inside a Mini, with space for a few motherboards too. What DFI has done, evidently, is employ the very best in the business, given them a room, and let them get on with it. Simple, really.
If you want a bespoke shirt you go to a quality tailor. If you want your enthusiast motherboard equipped with the most tweakable BIOS available you go to the legendary shellsuit-wearing Oscar Wu, another ex-abit man who knows more about architecting performance BIOSes than is advisable. Remember the introduction of DFI's innovative BIOS-saving options? That's Oscar's work. How about running 4 double-sided DIMMs at 1T? You can thank Oscar for that, too.
Oscar's a man who's committed to the cause. Offered a fully furnished apartment just around the corner from DFI's HQ, Oscar lives and breathes LANParty, literally! The above shot is a view of the other side of the 'office', which also functions as Oscar's home. As he explained, he cannot be too far from his work, as a moment's insight on how to tweak a particular BIOS can be actioned immediately.
The big man's PC is much like himself; impressive but all over the place. If any of our readers have a more, shall we say, 'enthusiast' PC, we'd like to know.
Here's some the team were working on earlier.
