Slots

If you know the old DFI LanParty Series, the first thing you will miss here is the huge jumper block. The switch between Dual-PCI-E and Single-Slot is now made in the BIOS.
The top-most PCI-E x16 slot has been moved further away from the second slot, so that there is better airflow if you are running in SLI. The drawback is that you can't use any PCI-E x1 slots when you have two video cards installed.

Cooling

The northbridge cooler has also been relocated a little bit. In the past its fan hub was right over a video card, blocking airflow. Now it sits in between.
While the cooler is not the quietest, its fan noise is not annoying at all.

Chips

ITE's 8712F is monitoring temperature, fan speed and voltages.


The Vitesse CIS8201 LAN Controller is used to implement Gigabit Ethernet via NVIDIA's nForce4 chipset. A Marvell 88E8001 Gigabit Ethernet controller is used for the second Gigabit Ethernet port.


Firewire (IEEE1394) comes from VIA. Their VT6307 chip is used.


The SiI 3114 chip adds an extra four SATA ports to the four SATA-II ports of the nForce 4.


Like on the last LanParty, all audio related circuitry is on a little PCB, which is plugged into the motherboard. Realtek's ALC850 8-channel sound chip is used there. If you don't need sound - don't plug the card in. According to DFI, the reason for an extra card is "to isolate the audio analog ground from digital ground eliminating noise signal and producing crystal sound output". Well, they probably mean crystal clear. I don't see a reason why this could not be done via regular circuitry, but still, it's a nice add-on. Compared to the non-expert series, the sound quality has been improved a little bit.