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DFI Lan Party KT400A Review

DFI is well known as a generic motherboard maker in the custom PC market.  Now, they also want to reach the custom PC builders and PC enthusiasts that often go to Lan Parties.  That is why DFI created the "Lan Party" series of motherboards.  They consist of KT400A and nForce 2 chipsets for AMD Athlon based systems, and the Intel 875 for Intel Pentium 4 based systems.  Today, we are going to take a look at the KT400A based Lan Party motherboard.

This is the biggest motherboard box I have seen, almost twice the size of a regular motherboard box.  There must be a lot of goodies inside...

Let's have a look at the back of the box first.  On the back, there are pictures, icons, and text describing the numerous features that this motherboard has.  A few interesting ones are the dual LAN ports, the Raid 1.5 and the EZ-On buttons.

Here is the full list of specifications from DFI:

Opening the box, you can see that it is crammed full of goodies.  In this picture, you can see the upper box containing the motherboard and manuals.  And the lower box containing the PC Transpo, which is a harness for your PC.  Very convenient for carrying your PC to a Lan Party.  On the next page, we will have a look at the accessories that come with this motherboard including the PC Transpo.

The accessories that come along with this motherboard are usually not found in other motherboard bundles.  This includes the PC Transpo carrying harness. 

In side the box marked PC Transpo, you will find that the carrying system is pretty simple.  There is a handle at the top of the harness for carrying your system by hand, or an optional shoulder strap for carrying a PC on your shoulder.  On the side of the harness, there is a pouch for carrying your keyboard, mouse, and LAN cables.

The PC Transpo system fits nicely on mid sized PC cases.  It wraps around the PC on all sides, ensuring a secure fit.  We tried to put this strap on our full tower Chieftec case but it wouldn't fit.  So, we recommend using this harness on a mid sized PC case.

The pouch on the side of the harness is also very handy, because you want to minimize the amount of items you are carrying.  If this pouch wasn't incorporated into the harness, you would have to carry the keyboard, mouse, and LAN cables separately in a backpack or bag. 

Underneath the motherboard box and PC Transpo box, there are 3 additional boxes.  A round cable box, accessory kit, and the Front X.

Inside the box marked accessory kit, you will find a Serial ATA hard drive power converter, a Serial ATA cable, a SPDIF in and out extension, a game port extension, some thermal grease, and the back plate for the motherboard.  Again there are some items that you will not find in a regular motherboard bundle, such as the Serial ATA power converter or thermal paste.

In the Front X box, you will find a 5 1/4" drive bay device which can host numerous I/O connectors.  These are beginning to become popular in motherboard bundles.

After assembling the Front X, you will end up with something that looks like this.  This configuration features two USB 2.0 ports,  one headphone jack, one microphone jack, and one Firewire port.  There appears to be an option to add more ports to the Front X, such as more Firewire and USB 2.0 ports.

Inside the round cable box, you will find two ATA/133 IDE cables, and one floppy cable.

The cables appear to be high quality, they feature braided aluminum in the tube to minimize the EMI (electromagnetic interference) inside the computer.  The cables are also reactive to UV light,  so if you have a UV light in your case along with a side panel window, you will notice that the cables will glow a bright green.

The Lan Party motherboard appears to be top quality in both specifications and visual appearance.

This motherboard is full fledged, featuring everything from AGP 8x to RAID, along with the option of SerialATA.  It even has features that are not found on any other motherboard, including the RAID 1.5, Dual LAN ports, and the EZ-On buttons on the board.

The Northbridge heat sink is also high quality as it incorporates more fins than regular motherboards.  It is also fairly large in size.  During our tests, we noticed that the heat sink stayed fairly cold even under over clocked settings. 

Under the Northbridge heat sink, we can finally see VIA's latest revision of the KT400, the KT400A.  I expect this chipset revision to be much better than the original KT400.  The KT400A features what VIA calls FastStream64 technology, which is basically improved latency with the memory controller.  Along with FastStream64 technology, VIA states that there is a 25% increase in performance and official FSB400 and DDR400 support.

A strange sight on a KT400A based motherboard is the added P4 power connector.   I'm guessing that DFI wanted greater stability in their LAN Party line of products.  I know that almost all nForce 2 motherboards include the P4 power connecter.

The front side bus speed is controlled by this dip switch.  You can select from 100mhz, 133mhz, 166mhz, and 200mhz.   Multipliers are selected from the BIOS. 

Near the battery, there are two switches.   DFI calls this feature EZ-on.  It is great if you are testing the motherboard without a case.  The one on the left turns on the system, the one on the right resets the system. 

On the back of the motherboard, there are the standard PS/2 ports, 2 serial ports, 1 parallel port, 2 ethernet ports, 4 USB 2.0 ports and the standard sound ports.  The motherboard supports Firewire which outputs to a port built into the Front X system.  There are also 2 additional USB 2.0 ports which extend to the Front X, making a total of 6 USB 2.0 ports.

One feature that really stands out is the Dual LAN ports.  I don't know what the point of having two LAN ports is for, unless it is to take load off the south bridge controlled LAN port.  One port is controlled by the integrated ethernet on the VIA southbridge, and one is controlled by a separate Realtek chip. 

RAID 1.5 technology is supposed to let the user do RAID 0+1 (striping and mirroring at the same time) with 2 drives.  The chip that DFI chose to use is the Highpoint HPT372N.

This motherboard also uses a set of 4 lights to tell the user what is happening during the boot process.  Two lights mean that the board is working fine.  This system is similar to MSI's D-Bracket, which also uses 4 lights, but have two different colors (Red/Green).

Finally, the last item to mention for the motherboard itself is the Lan Party silk screen on the motherboard.   It is very visible, letting people know that this is a LAN Party motherboard during LAN Parties if your case has a side window.  Side windows are a must with this motherboard because the slots on the board are UV reactive.

Here is a UV shot of the side of the motherboard.  You can see that the memory slots, IDE ports, AGP, and PCI slots light up nicely.  It would have been cool if DFI put some UV reactive paint onto the north bridge heatsink.  The UV light bulb was held about 10 inches away from the motherboard in this picture

Here is a more detailed view of the AGP slot and PCI slots.  Also, the silk screen LAN Party logo on the motherboard is white, so it lit up a bright purple.    The UV light bulb was placed about 5 inches away from the board in this picture.

This is a more detailed view of the IDE ports and battery holder.  As you can see they light up pretty nicely too.  They bulb was placed about 5 inches away from the board.

Here is an overall view of the motherboard.  A side window in your case is a must, the board looks very nice along with a UV Cold Cathode light.

This is the main BIOS screen.  It looks like any other BIOS screen, because 95% of the motherboards sold uses the AwardBIOS chip.  I will not go through the entire BIOS, since most users know what is under the standard and advanced bios features.

Under the Advanced Chipset Features page, there are options to change the DRAM settings, AGP settings and CPU bus settings.

Under the DRAM Clock Control page, you can change the RAM timings such as CAS Latency, Bank Interleave, Command Rate, etc.

Under the AGP Control page, you can control the AGP Aperture size, AGP mode, Fast Writes, etc.  This particular AGP setting page is a bit more advanced than other motherboards.

In the Power Management page, you can set the types of power saving modes that you would like to use.  Again, there are more options in this particular motherboard than others.  Such as Wake up events.

In the PC Health Status Page, you can see the overall system temperatures and voltages.  There are also numerous protection features too, such as showing the PC Heath during the POST, so the user knows if a fan fails or the temperatures right from start up.  This feature is similar to the Magic Health, seen on other motherboard.   Another method of protection is CPU Fan Protection, which sets the computer beeping of the fan header detects 0 rpms.  CPU Temperature alarm is another feature,  if the temperature exceeds a set degree, if will start beeping.  The last protection feature is the shutdown temperature, which will shut down the computer if it reaches a certain user set temperature.  Note that the BIOS gets the CPU temperature from under the CPU, not on-die.

Under the Genie BIOS setting page, is where the user can over clock the CPU, AGP, Memory, and Chipset voltages.  It is also where the user can select the multiplier, FSB and DRAM Clock.

This particular BIOS lets the user go as high as a 22.5x multiplier.  This is a great overclocking tool for people that have CPU's with low multiplier settings and their CPU is unlocked.

Another great thing is that the CPU Voltage can be taken all the way up to 2 volts, which is excellent for overclocking your CPU.  So far, this motherboard seems like a good overclocker.   We will see what happens in our tests later on.

The Chipset Voltage Control is very rare on motherboards.  This motherboard features it.  It is sought for greater CPU and system stability.  The higher the voltage the more stable the FSB and overall system gets.

Under all of frequency and voltage settings,  you will see controls for all of the onboard devices.  There are settings to enable and disable the LAN chips, Serial ATA, Firewire, RAID, and USB 2.0.  This is handy to turn off the RAID if you are not using it.

Test System:

-AMD Athlon XP 1700+ T-Bred 'B'

-512MB of Corsair PC3200 DDR Memory

-60GB 7200rpm Maxtor Hard Drive

-DFI Lan Party KT400A Motherboard

-Gigabyte GA-7VAXP KT400 Motherboard

-Soltek SL-75FRN2 nForce 2 Motherboard

-Thermaltake Volcano 11+ Xaser Edition

Overclocking

Overclocking the DFI Lan Party KT400A took a long time to get it stable at 183fsb at any multiplier.  This is a confirmed KT400A "bug" by other hardware review websites.  At 183fsb x 11 multiplier, you get 2002MHz which is still a good overclock with the 1700+ T-Bred B.  However, with the Gigabyte GA-7VAXP, we were able to get a 188MHz FSB.  So, instantly we knew that the LAN Party was only a moderate overclocker.  This shouldn't be a serious concern, since it is a "LAN Party" motherboard which is designed for stability at stock clock speeds. 

Testing/Benchmarks

During testing, I noticed it took a long time for the motherboard to boot.   The status LED's on the motherboard would hang for 10 seconds, then boot.  I found this to be very strange, since other boards boot much faster. 

The above scores are the result of the test motherboards being set to stock settings.  As you can see the boards are about the same with the scores. 

The above scores represent the motherboard at default settings and the CPU at 1700+ (1.47GHz) Here, we can see that there is a slight improvement between the KT400 (Gigabyte) and the KT400A.  But the winner here is the nForce 2 motherboard, due to the better memory controller/latency.

Here are the scores with the processor set at 183MHz.  I set the FSB to 183MHz because the DFI would not go any higher.  The results are very simular to the non-overclocked settings, the KT400A (DFI) doing a little bit better than the original KT400.  They still can't catch up to the nForce 2 motherboard though.

The graph above represents the 3DMark2001SE scores at 183MHz FSB.  The KT400A is slightly faster than the original KT400, but you will not notice at all when playing games. 

In conclusion, the DFI LAN Party appears to be still in it experimental stages.  DFI is the only motherboard maker who has attempted to make a motherboard appeal to LAN party goers.  They have added DualLAN, UV Reactive motherboard slots / cables, and RAID 1.5.  In my opinion, I think they succeeded.  The motherboard's bright color scheme immediately catches the eye, which is what the person that owns this board wants.  People who go to LAN parties want to show off their rigs, the DFI motherboard really helps in making the inside of the case look fantastic.  Performance wise, the motherboard performs adequately but will not appeal to overclockers.  For people who don't want to overclock, but to show off their rig, this is the motherboard for them. 

Let's have a look at some Pro's and Con's:

Pro's:

-Excellent motherboard quality + looks

-Great feature bundle PC Transpo, Round Cables, and FrontX included in one package!

-PC Transpo, excellent for carrying your case.

Con's:

-Expensive

-Not a good overclocker.

Overall, Techaddicts Computer Reviews would like to award this motherboard a 8.5 out of 10 for it's innovation and great design.  Techaddicts would also like to award the TA Editors Choice award for most interesting motherboard.

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