LAN PARTY KT400A - LAN PARTY KT400A
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DFI LAN PARTY KT400A
PACKAGING
The LAN PARTY KT400A has to be one of the more impressive packages I have seen. DFI put some effort into making an attractive box that contained quite a few items. The front of the box depicts a "LAN Party gamer" and the back of the box shows the motherboard and a description of all it's features.
Upon opening the box, you discover 4 smaller boxes containing all the goodies.
The four additional boxes are:
- The standard accessory box contains riser plates for the SPDIF, Firewire, and gameport, I/O backplate, a packet of generic thermal paste and Serial ATA power data and power cables.
- A box with the PC Transporter (this looks like a copy of the Gear Grip Pro system with a LAN PARTY badge)
- A box containing 2 IDE and 1 floppy UV reactive cables
- A box with the FrontX I/O breakout box
You will also find a plastic bag with a LAN PARTY sticker, a real metal case badge with raised lettering and some extra tall motherboard jumpers with the little thumb tabs that I love. Last but not least, you will find the user's manual, a feature manual, a free copy of Intervideo's WinCinema DVD software and a pretty doggone good installation foldout.
Features
This motherboard is based on the VIA KT400A chipset comprised of the VIA ® KT400A and VT8235. However, DFI is using the VIA ® KT400A and VT8235CD. As you can see the only difference between the VT8235 and VT8237 is the addition of support for Serial ATA and two more USB 2.0 ports. DFI's version of the southbridge doesn't quite meet the specs of the VT8237 because it only has one Serial ATA port on the motherboard.
Above is a block diagram of the KT400A + VT8237 architecture.
DFI has seen fit to give you two utilities to keep your motherboard in tip top shape. The first one is called RadarSync and it is a specially designed program similar to Windows Update except that it only hunts for updates for the hardware on your motherboard. This is the program that can perform your "live update" function.
The second program is the Windbond Hardware Monitor. This is a very small program that will give you details on your motherboard that you would normally have to get by rebooting the machine to look at the BIOS or by using another third-party product like Motherboard Monitor.
The LAN Party KT400A will allow you to run either IDE and Serial ATA devices, or standard and RAID IDE devices. You can have eight USB 2.0 ports, two 10/100 Ethernet ports and three IEEE 1394 ports active and run 6 channel audio. There seems to be enough choices to keep the tweaker geek busy for quite a while.
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