In just a few short years, DFI has risen from retail obscurity to become one of the hottest enthusiast-oriented motherboard manufacturers. Interestingly, an ex-Abit employee may be responsible for some of DFI's newfound popularity among gamers and enthusiasts. Several years ago, Oskar Wu—designer of the famous BP6—jumped ship from Abit to DFI. Since then, he's churned out LANParty designs that have provided consistently impressive overclocking performance, as well as innovative new features and BIOS options. The LANParty UT CFX3200-DR is no exception.

Despite having more expansion slots, ports, and peripherals than the AT8 32X, the CFX3200 actually has a more spacious layout with fewer annoying quirks. Power connectors are located along the top-right edge of the board where cable clutter won't interfere with air flow, and DFI even throws in an eight-pin ATX 12V connector for those with compatible power supplies. It's also nice to see the IDE ports moved up the board, since most folks are only using them with optical drives.

I'm also pleased to see DFI separate the DIMM slots, arranging them in pairs to allow for a little more airflow between memory modules. However, I'm not so keen on where the DIMM slots sit. Like most recent LANParty designs, the CFX3200 flips the traditional DIMM slot and socket placements. DIMM slots are on the left of the board next to the port cluster, while the CPU socket is on the right. In theory, this layout should allow the DIMM slots to receive better cooling from rear-mounted exhaust fans. However, I'd prefer that extra ventilation around the CPU socket, which is arguably a much bigger hot spot. I'm also not crazy about the prospect of warm air around the CPU traversing the DIMM slots to get to a case's rear exhaust fan.

Slot and socket layout aside, the CFX3200 leaves plenty of room for larger processor coolers. Low-profile heatsinks dot the board's VRMs, but none should interfere with even the widest aftermarket monstrosities.

Interestingly, despite the popularity of passive chipset cooling, DFI opts for an active north bridge cooler. The cooler uses a magnetic levitation fan that we've found to be much quieter and more reliable than traditional designs, but given the CrossFire Xpress 3200 north bridge's modest heat output, we have to wonder if active cooling is necessary at all.

Given the CFX3200's layout, it probably is. The board puts the north bridge chip directly behind the PCI Express x16 slots, requiring a low-profile cooler that won't interfere with longer graphics cards. As modest as the Xpress 3200's heat output may be, we've only seen it cooled with taller passive heatsinks, not shorter fanless designs.

With low-profile coolers for both its north and south bridge chips, the CFX3200 leaves plenty of clearance for longer and even double-wide graphics cards around both of its PCI Express x16 slots. DFI managed to squeeze three PCI slots onto the board, too.

Speaking of squeezing, the CFX3200 shoehorns in a whopping eight Serial ATA ports. They're all clustered on the bottom right-hand corner of the board—right next to where most enclosures provide hard drive mounts. Here you'll also find board-mounted power and reset buttons, which are particularly handy for troubleshooting and open test benches.

Apart from a gaping hole, whose filler we'll get to in a moment, the CFX3200's port cluster is pretty standard. The board offers six USB ports, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, Firewire, and a pair of Gigabit Ethernet jacks. Internal headers offer the possibility of two additional USB ports and one Firewire port. Parallel and serial ports aren't provided, but there is an onboard serial port header.

On the audio front, the CFX3200 offers coaxial S/PDIF input and output ports and an array of analog audio ports on a small riser card that plugs into the board.

The riser also houses the audio codec, lifting it off the board to reduce the impact of board-level noise. We'll see whether that has an impact on playback when we test audio quality later in the review.