DFI LANParty DK 790FX-B M2RSH

DFI only includes six SATA, with another two spots only sporting solder joints and no connectors or SATA chip - an unfortunate and surprising cut back considering the amount of letters DFI have adorned for a 790FX-B M2RSH - you'd think it would have every feature possible. It's the DK side that determines this - with the LT and UT including more fulfilling options above it.


On the plus side, said SATA ports are 90 degrees and not in any way restricted by long graphics cards, as is the floppy connector should you ever need to use it. The 8-pin EPS power connector is sort of nestled between the rear I/O and heatsink but it's still easy enough to get a finger in, but DFI still insists on using crappy floppy power connectors that look like 4-pin fan headers, instead of Molex ones for the supplementary PCI-Express power.

DFI squeezes in just a four phase power regulation design, with a 2+1 approach to beef it up a bit, but with a high power AMD CPU in the socket, it's still stressing it considerably as the heatsink bolted onto it gets very hot indeed. All the chokes are environmentally sealed, although they aren't particularly large to hold induced power and the entire board is decked out in Nippon Chemicon solid aluminium capacitors too.


The only difference between the M2RS and the more expensive M2RSH is literally these heatsinks - the non-H version has more simple, plain black aluminium coolers, without the heatpipe setup, held down by push-pins. The M2RSH heatsinks are firmly bolted down to provide an excellent contact, but getting them off is a complete pain in the backside - the bolts are held in with a plastic wax and the screwheads simply shear off. The northbridge heatsink can be upgraded independently of the heatpipe arrangement which is great to see, but the space between the CPU and graphics areas is certainly limiting.


The board is kitted with a single PCI-Express Gigabit Ethernet and also a premium quality Realtek HD sound codec. The ALC885 has always sported content protection support for HDCP flagged media, however it's down to the software that supports it to enable its use (and very few apps do support this). Regardless, while getting on a bit now, the ALC885 is still a higher quality audio codec than most so it's good to see it here. That, coupled with both types of S/PDIF connectors on the rear I/O, means DFI has this area well covered.

Finally, DFI stretches to include three PCI slots as well as three PCI-Express 2.0 x16 - there's plenty of space for multi-GPU, although running anything in the bottom PCI-Express slot (even non-graphics cards) rejigs the slot layout to x16/x8/x8. In addition, three-way CrossFire is not an option too, unless the bottom card is single slot, because it's simply set too low.