DFI Infinity 975X/G

DFI is renowned in the world of motherboard manufacturing for its products built with the enthusiast in mind right from the start. The company's Infinity series is the budget-orientated line of motherboards that are lighter on features (to be honest, anything is compared to the LANParty series mobos), but still contain that passionate DFI engineering at the heart. The Infinity 975X/G board supports Intel's Core 2 Duo processors and has a lot to live up to. Over the last few weeks, we've been looking at this board to find out if DFI has made an irresistible and perhaps cost effective enthusiast solution for Core 2.

Board Details:

• Support for all Intel LGA775 processors including Pentium 4, D and Core 2;
  
• Intel 975X chipset and ICH7R southbridge with RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and 5 support;
  
• Support for up to 8GB of DDR2-533, DDR2-667 or DDR2-800MHz memory;
  
• Two PCI-Express x16 slots (either x16 and x1 or x8 and x8) with ATI Crossfire support;
  
• One PCI-Express x1 slot and one PCI-Express x4 slot (either x1 and x1 or one x4);
  
• Two legacy PCI slots;
  
• Realtek ALC882 High Definition audio codec with 8 channel sound support and S/PDIF;
  
• Realtek RTL8111B PCI-Express Gigabit Ethernet;
  
• Four SATA 3Gbps ports and a single IDE channel;
  
• JMB360 IC supporting a single eSATA port;
  
• Firewire VT6307 One internal and one external port;
  
• Eight USB 2.0 ports, four internal and four on the rear I/O.

Box Contents:

• User Manual, CD and RAID/eSATA floppy disks;
  
• One IDE cable;
  
• One floppy cable;
  
• Two serial ATA cables;
  
• One serial SATA molex power adapter;
  
• A metal I/O shield.

As you can see, the Infinity series is almost the exact opposite of the LANParty UT series which contains everything under the sun in one box. This, however, offers pretty much the bare minimum: there are no extra USB or Firewire PCI brackets and there are just two SATA cables. It's more of a gesture of something useful because people expect to get a few bits to get going, rather than any sort of serious offering (without sounding religious). It's disappointing but understandable considering this is DFI's budget line and part of how it saves money for the consumer. With that said we hoped DFI have concentrated on the board instead and retained the quality there.