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Spec
| DFI KT400A Lan Party | |
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Northbridge |
VIA VT8377A KT400A |
| Southbridge |
VIA VT8235CE |
| PCI |
5 x 32-bit, 33MHz |
| Audio |
C-Media CMI9739A |
| Ethernet |
2 ports, VIA VT6103 PHY from 8235CE, Realtek 8101 discrete |
| IDE |
2 ports, 4 devices from VT8235CE |
| Memory |
3GB DDR400, 3 slots |
| USB2.0 |
4 backplate, 2 flyoff |
| Firewire |
3 channels from VIA VT6306 |
| Serial ATA |
1 shared channel from Marvell 88i8030 bridge from HPT RAID |
| RAID |
Hightpoint RAID featuring RAID '1.5' |
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Good god, even more features than the AOpen (and that's not including the shocking array of kit you get in the bundle, check that out on the next page). We've got dual Ethernet, 6 device PATA support, 2 of those on the Highpoint RAID controller. The Highpoint supports RAID '1.5', basically, RAID 0+1 (stripe set and mirror) on 2 disks. I didn't test it out unfortunately, although it seems a little redundant. If mirror and stripe set are over both disks, you get no real redundancy if a disk in the set fails, so why mirror? Unless I understand its implementation wrongly which I undoubtedly do.
The SATA support is via a Marvel PATA to SATA bridge chip (found on devices like Highpoint's own RocketRAID controllers and even some SATA drives themselves, basically PATA under the hood with SATA bridge logic).
Audio is via a discrete C-Media CMI9739A processor. According to C-Media's documentation on the diminutive chip, it does Sensaura positional audio, AC-3 encoding, EAX 2.0, 96KHz sample rate, 20-bit resolution (although only 18-bit when used with anything other than Intel's ICH4 bridge) and other 6-channel goodies. Quite the piece of audio hardware, it's a shame our testing methods don't cover in-depth audio testing.
FireWire, a full 3 channels worth, from the VT6306, oft found even on Intel boards, rounds things off. Yikes, very nearly the most feature packed motherboard I've ever seen. The bundle just makes things even more incredible, more on that soon).
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Shot
Layout
Before we cover layout, special mention must go to the colour scheme. While not immediately obvious from my frankly shocking digital photography skills, the lurid green parts of the motherboard are UV sensitive. Throw a UV blacklight into your case and you'll have a mini light show without the aid of cold cathodes or other such nonsense. Whether you are a fan of black and UV reactive green as a colour scheme is up to you. It does stand out just a fraction. Nobody will question your sexuality either, should you decide to buy one, honest.
Onto the layout proper.
Rotated socket but no proper grounded mounting holes means it's clip based heatsink action only. Boo! Flanked by a nice array of capacitors and other power related hardware, it gives the initial appearance of good stability under load. If you miss the DDR slots next to the socket area, you can't even read this review so it wont matter me calling you blind. A bank of DIP switches to the right of the slots control the front side bus. There's a 200MHz marking and selection, but it does nothing as far as 200MHz CPU support goes, the test XP3200+ 200MHz processor wouldn't boot when that was selected.
Lastly on the top half of the board, we hit the 2 IDE port for the 4 device support from the VT8235CE, along with a green floppy connector.
The northbridge is passively cooled, a good thing, along with the now commonplace positioning of the ATX power connector. It's still in a crap position, three boards in. It's a 6 slot board, meaning good room around the DDR slot end tabs. Slotting in a large graphics card wont hinder DDR memory module insertion or removal.
5 green PCI slots, sitting on a wall. PCB? Whatever, they are there anyway. The bottom right hand portion of said PCB is crowded with lots of good stuff. We have the Highpoint RAID hardware, the mini Marvell bridge for the SATA port, the SATA port itself, the VT6303 FireWire chip, the headers for that chip and finally, the coolest feature on a mainstream motherboard. Ever. I kid you not, on-PCB power and reset buttons are the best thing since ABIT cut the PS2 ports from a motherboard. When you test motherboards as much as I do, it could be a VIA EPIA or an original KT133 reference board I was testing, if it had these little push button wonders, I'd like it.
Enough about easily pleased reviewers liking to push little buttons, I better talk about the BIOS and whatnot.
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