LANParty KT400A from DFI

The "LAN Party" KT400A from DFI
A Different Approach from DFI

By: Jeff Bouton
June 11th, 2003

There is a healthy rivalry brewing between AMD chipset manufacturers VIA and NVIDIA.  These companies have been competing for the top spot in the AMD chipset market for some time now.  When VIA introduced the KT400, NVIDIA stepped up with their nForce2 and have since won the hearts, and dollars, of many users.  Unfortunately for VIA, the KT400 simply could not compete with the performance of the nForce2.  So, motherboard makers seemed quite content adopting NVIDIA's newest chipset.  This in turn sent VIA back to the lab for some changes.  For anyone who has been watching the hardware market for the last few years, this is typical of VIA with virtually every release of a new chipset being followed by a revision ?A? soon thereafter.  While this hardly seems to be an effective trend, to VIA's credit, they usually get it right the second time around.  Now that the KT400A has been released, VIA is aiming to take back some of the market share they relinquished to NVIDIA. 

Another company that has its sights set on market share is DFI.  We?ve been reviewing their hardware for a number of years now, with each product often leaving us with a positive experience.  While they don't generally have a reputation for producing the fastest motherboards on the market, we?ve often felt their stability was excellent.  However, offering bland but stable products alone is not going to bring increasing amounts of revenue year after year.  So, in an effort to garner the attention, and envy, of the enthusiast crowd, DFI created a completely new product line like we?ve never seen from them before.  Dubbed ?LAN Party?, DFI has created a complete package that offers more extras, great looks and top notch performance.  It is obvious that DFI is trying to set themselves apart from the rest of the crowd and our initial impressions are that they may be on to something.
 

Features of the DFI LAN Party KT400A Motherboard Raising The Bar

The KT400A Chipset

The DFI LAN Party KT400A motherboard obviously is built around VIA's KT400A chipset.  The KT400A comes in two flavors, one with the VT8237 Southbridge, which is still in development, and the other with the VT8235CE Southbridge.  The main difference between the two Southbridges is that the VT8237 will support SATA natively as well as 8 USB ports, while the VT8335CE on the other hand, doesn't support SATA and offers a total of 6 USB ports.

On the surface, the KT400A Northbridge is not all that different from the KT400 with the most notable alteration being support for a 400MHz memory bus.  This was essentially VIA's response to the nForce2's DualDDR Memory Architecture.  While the nForce2 is a DualDDR capable chipset with separate memory controllers, VIA took a different approach by adding their FastStream64 Technology.  FastStream64 uses a series of prefetch buffers to reduce latency which should have a direct affect on memory performance.  In the end, the memory can offer bandwidth of up to 3.2GB per second at 400MHz. and VIA claims their single memory controller solution is as fast as NVIDIA's Dual-Channel solution.

Before we get into the mix with performance testing of the "LAN Party" KT400A motherboard, there are a lot of other things to see first.  The "LAN Party" comes with one the most impressive packages we've ever seen, so let's take a look at what comes in the box and then we'll take a closer look at the board itself.