What is that, Oscar???
This is what the LANParty team uses to test sane voltages. Oscar, however, has something a little bigger for extreme testing.
It caused significant head-scratching and bemusement.....
We tried to remove it when Jarry and Oscar weren't looking. Either it's bolted to the floor or it weighs 100kg+.
And just in case we had any bright ideas of borrowing some of the team's ideas for ourselves, protection was close at hand.
Hilarity aside, the main reason why you don't see DFI launch a LANParty version immediately after a new chipset has been announced and other manufacturers have released their implementations is simple enough to understand. The team's ethos is to only release the premier version once both Oscar and Jarry are happy with the effort, a decision that's backed up by DFI's senior management. LANParty, then, can be thought of as a semi-autonomous group within the DFI organisation.
What it also shows is that simply throwing manpower at a particular problem is rarely the best way of achieving the desired end result. Rather, as DFI has done, the most-efficient manner is to recruit the very best in the industry and, frankly, let them get on with it with minimal intervention. The success of the LANParty line, whose constituent motherboards consistently receive the highest recommendations from the global press, is proof enough of the effectiveness of this kind of approach.
DFI has a number of other interesting projects in the pipeline and the LANParty team is busy working on a couple of motherboards that may well become must-have boards in the very near future, so stay tuned for an update.
It's been refreshing to see that DFI actually sticks to its company acronym; there's plenty of innovation in Oscar's house. We wonder if other companies will follow DFI's lead and invest in a tuning arm dedicated to pure performance hardware. Somehow, now appreciating and cognisant of the general Taiwanese sentiment that puts caution ahead of true enterprise, we somehow think not.
