Board layouts
Apart from their north bridge chips and DIMM slot configurations, the LANParty 925X-T2 and UT 915P-T12 share identical layouts. They also share a common palette; both come on dark boards with fluorescent orange and yellow slots and ports. The unique look is especially striking under the influence of UV lighting, and should be popular with those who like to show off system internals through case windows.

As far as overall layout is concerned, these boards are pretty solid. Power connectors are located near the top edge (right in the picture) of the board, which helps to minimize cable clutter around the CPU socket. Both boards use 24-pin primary power connectors, but the plugs are keyed to accept 20-pin power from standard ATX power supplies, if needed.

The 925X-T2 and 915P-T12 both leave plenty of room around the LGA775 socket for standard heat sinks. Note the large passive north bridge heat sink in the above picture. DFI uses passive heat sinks on both boards' north and south bridge chips, which keeps noise to a minimum and makes fan failure a non-issue.

Unfortunately, the layout isn't all roses. The DIMM slot tabs on both boards interfere with longer PCI Express graphics cards, making it impossible to install or remove memory modules without removing the system's graphics card. It's a minor annoyance, but one that DFI could have avoided by moving the memory slots as little as half an inch.

The 925X-T2 and 915P-T12 mix one PCI Express X16 slot with three PCI-E X1 slots and three standard PCI slots.

Interestingly, one of the PCI-E x1 slots is mounted on the lower right-hand corner of the board, far away from a case's expansion ports. The placement of this slot is bizarre to say the least, but I suspect it would be appropriate for PCI-E RAID or storage controllers that would only interface with internal system components.

While we're down here, notice how all the storage-related ports are clustered in one corner of the board. Both LANPartys also offer board-mounted power and reset buttons, which are a joy to work with on my open test bench. DFI even sneaks in a set of four diagnostic LEDs that display POST error codes visually rather than with ear-splitting tones. To complete the effect, there's a jumper to mute the on-board speaker.

The 925X-T2 and 915P-T12 banish serial and parallel ports in favor of an updated port cluster that's heavy on audio and USB. In addition to an impressive six USB ports, the boards serve up digital S/PDIF input and output ports and a full array of analog audio ports. The analog audio ports are actually on a riser card that DFI dubs "Karajan" audio.

The Karajan audio riser also houses the Realtek ALC880 codec. According to DFI, isolating the codec on the riser card reduces noise and results in improved audio clarity. We'll see if it has any measurable impact in our audio quality tests in a moment.