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Anyone remember DFI Lan Party Motherboards?

N

n370zed

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 21, 2012
Messages
473
I remember in the early 2000s when I was in high school I built a few PCs with this brand. Whatever happened to them?
 
I had a DFI Lan Party board with a Q6600 cpu. Was a great board. Seems that they are still around but are more on the industrial side of things now.
 
Still have a whole computer with a SLI-DR and a CABNE Opteron.

I will probably use it soon. It has 5 optical drives and I need to re-rip my music CDs to flac.
 
Hell ya
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Of course I remember DFI! I still have a UT nF4 Ultra-D and throughout the years I can remember owning an X58-T3eH8 and a 790FXB-M3H5 too.

Bit-tech did a great article when the consumer side shut down- The (LAN)Party is over for DFI

Even though they killed off the consumer Lanparty segment, they are still around for industrial type stuff: https://www.dfi.com/
 
I still have my last DFI board. X58-T3eH8. Works like a champ and still overclocks well even after all these years. Just looking for a period correct case and some GTX 680s for a Tri-SLI rig. Sure wish they were still around in the consumer sector.
 

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I had a DFI LANPARTY LT P35-T2R then a DFI LanParty JR P45-T2RS. Both were fantastic boards if I remember correctly.
 
Good boards but could be finicky with things iirc. More focused on aestetics, and overclocking at expense of some stability. More remembered for the time and era imho.
 
The second Slot 1 board that I owned was a DFI. It was a decent board. It replaced the Asus that came with the HP that I got the parts from haha. Let me run my P3 450 at between 525 and 565MHz I think?

Maybe 565 is where I had to reinstall windows lol.. been awhile heh..
 
If i dug around long enough I think i still have my DFI P35, was a rock solid budget board back in the 775 days
 
Yes I remember them and their X48 model that had the external VRM heatpipe cooler extended out the back.
I had one of those along with another customer's identical model literally go up in flames. (VRM) I suspect it was the shitty Andyson 1200W PSU as both systems used that same crap unit.

Those were pre UEFI days and one could get lost in all the options in the Award BIOS. If you were a [H]ardcore tweaker you were in heaven and could spend days in settings wringing every last % of performance out of ram and CPU for whatever it was you were seeking!
 
I had an 865 Infinity board and an Ultra D back in the day. I was always partial to Abit back then though. DFI required a little more tweaking than I was comfortable with back then.
 
Ahhh the SKT939 days of running a dual core Opteron in my DFI Lanparty NF4 board. Modded to run SLI with two 7900GTX and with Geil DDR500 ram...

Awesome. Just never ever try to run 4 sticks of ram in them. Some things never really change...
 
daglesj said:
Ahhh the SKT939 days of running a dual core Opteron in my DFI Lanparty NF4 board. Modded to run SLI with two 7900GTX and with Geil DDR500 ram...

Awesome. Just never ever try to run 4 sticks of ram in them. Some things never really change...
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The LANparty boards took 4 sticks very well. I had 4 different manufacturers in 4 slots just to prove a point on xtremesystems.com. What happened to them, anyway?
 
uOpt said:
The LANparty boards took 4 sticks very well. I had 4 different manufacturers in 4 slots just to prove a point on xtremesystems.com. What happened to them, anyway?
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Hmm my memory at the time on the DFI/NF4 forums seem to differ. Some tears of those trying to run 4 sticks. Doesnt matter, thankfully long way behind us now. The only time I ever ran more than two was in my old dual Xeon Dell Workstation (damn 8 sticks of DDR2 ECC could heat a room) and more recently my x99 HEDT Quad setup.

Now back to two sticks. :(
 
kirbyrj said:
I had an 865 Infinity board and an Ultra D back in the day. I was always partial to Abit back then though. DFI required a little more tweaking than I was comfortable with back then.
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The Corsair BH-5 memory is what finally got me over the edge with OCing.
What I loved about those days was we could buy cheap and come out ahead of the top tier.
Just like LanParty gaming, those days are gone. DFI 680i LT SLI T2R1 pictured below
 

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I wasnt brave enough to own a DFI, but they were certainly the cool board in the day.
 
The last board I had from them was the DFI LANPARTY DK-P35-T2RS. It was a nice board.
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^^^ Overpaid like crazy for the 875 version of that board on my first build. I miss it now, not because it was particularly good but because I'll take the UV plastics over RGB any day.

Someone could bring it back on some cheap matx board and get a ton of publicity, maybe start selling UV LEDs.
 
KonaKona040 said:
^^^ Overpaid like crazy for the 875 version of that board on my first build. I miss it now, not because it was particularly good but because I'll take the UV plastics over RGB any day.

Someone could bring it back on some cheap matx board and get a ton of publicity, maybe start selling UV LEDs.
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I'd love that. I never owned a dfi board but I always thought the uv stuff was cool.
 
I remember these. Unlike most people, I don't have many fond memories of the brand. I used to build a lot of systems back in the day and tons of people wanted various DFI models. As a result, I worked with far more of these boards than most people did. The DFI boards I remember almost never worked right without an insane amount of tweaking. They were very picky about what RAM they did and did not behave with. I fucking hated these things. Any motherboard that can't give you a stable system on default settings is a piece of shit. Full stop. DFI boards never did this with any combination of hardware I tried.

A lot of people made excuses for them calling them: "a tuner's board" and all that crap. The truth is DFI didn't do anything or have anything beyond the UV gimmick that other brands didn't do as well or better. When I got into doing motherboard reviews, I reviewed a handful of them as the brand was already in decline by that point. Most reviewed well enough because there was minimal tweaking to do in order to stabilize them by that point. The last one I reviewed was some really expensive X58 model they had. It was OK but a bit too quirky for the money it cost. Granted, that pretty well summarizes the brand as a whole and its not the only brand I could say that for at the time. GIGABYTE's X58A-UD9 was one such example but that was a single board model more than indicative of the whole brand.

For me as a reviewer, the time up to X58 was the best. After X58, the amount of brands out there sharply declined as DFI and many, many others flat out exited the market or folded. DFI, ABIT, Intel, Foxconn, ECS and more exiting the market around that time. (Give or take a product generation or two.) I wish I had been involved in the business during the late 1990's and early 2000's when motherboards had more varied performance between them with L2 cache being on the motherboard instead of the CPU. That's probably the point where the market was most interesting.
 
I would imagine when it turned into pretty much single chipset provider instead of an Nvidia vs Via, could have made it quite boring, early 2000s you had:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/814

with AMD760 vs KT133A vs SiS735 vs KT266 vs upcoming Nvidia nForce, once all brand have the same chipset the difference can get quite small (with a cpu that do more and more itself to start with).
 
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LukeTbk said:
I would imagine when it turned into pretty much single chipset provider instead of an Nvidia vs Via, could have made it quite boring, early 2000s you had:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/814

with AMD760 vs KT133A vs SiS735 vs KT266 vs upcoming Nvidia nForce, once all brand have the same chipset the difference can get quite small (with a cpu that do more and more itself to start with).
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The chipset ecosystem ended up being locked when Nehalem came out. Intel didn't play nice after that and AMD followed suit. By that point AMD's only competition in the chipset market was NVIDIA. NVIDIA essentially got shut out of the chipset / platform business almost overnight. Some motherboard makers held out longer than others but when the third party chipset business floundered, many companies called it quits. Given what Intel and AMD were charging for chipsets at the time, (as well as the strict guidelines for implementing Intel chipsets) many probably didn't see it as a viable business anymore. Companies like DFI and ECS still exist, but they exited the DIY motherboard business entirely.

It's a shame. While a lot of those brands sucked, I got tired of always reviewing MSI, ASUS and GIGABYTE motherboards. The occasional ASRock board became a treat despite my horrifying luck with their stuff. Though in more recent years I haven't had any issues with ASRock either. In truth, the motherboard business is a lot more boring than it used to be. Not only because there are fewer companies now but because motherboards are more reliable and better quality than they used to be. The minimum standard for quality in that market (due to fierce competition) is much higher than it was even a few years ago.

I used to have to fight my way through budget board reviews. That hasn't been the case for a few years now. Unless you are buying just the absolute most bargain bin shit you can possibly find, its hard to justify the prices of halo level boards unless they have some specific feature or aesthetic you are looking for. Low-mid to mid-tier boards are good enough 95% of the time now.
 
I remember them costing an arm and a leg, not much else.
 
M76 said:
I remember them costing an arm and a leg, not much else.
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DFI wasn't as expensive as say ASUS or ABIT boards were. Not that I recall anyway. They certainly were more expensive than say EPoX (another shitty brand people loved for some reason), FIC and the like.
 
Dan_D said:
DFI wasn't as expensive as say ASUS or ABIT boards were. Not that I recall anyway. They certainly were more expensive than say EPoX (another shitty brand people loved for some reason), FIC and the like.
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Maybe they weren't that expensive, but certainly on par with ASUS and Abit, but I remember them being highly sought after, no clue why.

I kind of miss affordable computing. There were so many cheap second rate brands, it was the wild west almost: ACORP, Amptron, Aristo, Chaintech, Mercury, Sector, Tomato, what else?
 
M76 said:
but I remember them being highly sought after, no clue why.
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For their overclocking prowess, they were pretty awesome in that regard, at least on 939 from what I can recall. I owned a P3 board from them, long before 939. It was ok. It gave me my first OC, a PIII 450 up to 525 I think, maybe a bit more. Or maybe that bit more was where I had to reinstall windows lol..

After that I got a Soyo Dragon, that was a good board. Gave me my first taste of 1GHz on a Coppermine 833. Got it to 1.065. After that I hosed the bios.
 
M76 said:
Maybe they weren't that expensive, but certainly on par with ASUS and Abit, but I remember them being highly sought after, no clue why.

I kind of miss affordable computing. There were so many cheap second rate brands, it was the wild west almost: ACORP, Amptron, Aristo, Chaintech, Mercury, Sector, Tomato, what else?
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Back in those days motherboards were typically between $70 and $150. I think some ultra-premium boards went for a little closer to the $200 mark but they were few and far between unless they had two CPU sockets.
 
freeagentt said:
For their overclocking prowess, they were pretty awesome in that regard, at least on 939 from what I can recall. I owned a P3 board from them, long before 939. It was ok. It gave me my first OC, a PIII 450 up to 525 I think, maybe a bit more. Or maybe that bit more was where I had to reinstall windows lol..

After that I got a Soyo Dragon, that was a good board. Gave me my first taste of 1GHz on a Coppermine 833. Got it to 1.065. After that I hosed the bios.
Click to expand...
I had a Celeron 600 that I dailyed at 1080. Things will never be the same again, so much untapped potential.
 
Dan_D said:
I remember these. Unlike most people, I don't have many fond memories of the brand. I used to build a lot of systems back in the day and tons of people wanted various DFI models. As a result, I worked with far more of these boards than most people did. The DFI boards I remember almost never worked right without an insane amount of tweaking. They were very picky about what RAM they did and did not behave with.
Click to expand...

Strange. I still have very colorful photo somewhere with a full spread of RAM heatspreaders when I put in 4 totally different modules into my Lanparty 939 board. That was on XS to nag people who bought RAM by approved vendor list.
 
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