Remember those day-glo orange IDE cables? Well, it turns out that's pretty much the color scheme on the LANParty Pro875. The sheer amount of orange is testament to its expansion capabilities; it's one thing to read about four DIMM slots, four channels of IDE, five PCI, etc. on the specs table, but when it's all there shouting "Look at me!" in bright orange, you realize just how much stuff it is. Obviously the effect would be further enhanced by a black light in a windowed case. In fact, at that point I think a case would work nicely as, say, a substitute lamp for a lighthouse.

Squint through all that orange, and you'll start to make out some other stuff. For example, the placement of the power connectors is close to the "top" of the board when it's installed in a tower case, so you should have plenty of slack to route the cables however you'd like. Now let's look at some other board features a little more closely.

DFI opts for a passive north bridge heatsink on the LANParty Pro875, but as you can see, it's a pretty damn beefy passive heatsink. If you're concerned that this heatsink might limit the Pro875's overclocking potential, don't be. You'll see later that it held up like a champ when it came time to overclock, and that was on a test bench that had less airflow than the average case.

In spite of all the stuff packed onto the board, there's still plenty of room between the AGP slot and the clips of the DIMM sockets. Installing or removing RAM without removing the AGP card is no sweat.

Just to one side of the board's case connectors (power LED, HD LED, etc.) is this pair of switches. One is a power switch and the other is a reset switch. These come in especially handy during testing and initial setup of the board.

Thanks to the camera's flash, they look pretty washed out here, but when you actually have the board up and running in front of you, these diagnostic LEDs are easy to spot between the Serial ATA connectors and the ATA/133 RAID ports. They flash in patterns during system initialization, and if you run into problems, a table in the manual will let you decode the pattern of LEDs and figure out what's keeping the board from booting.

Here's a shot of the Pro875's port cluster. There are four USB 2.0 ports back here, as well as three audio ports and the Gigabit LAN.