What happened to DFI?

[Fracture]

I've been noticing that DFI doesn't have much of the enthusiast market segment anymore. What happened to them? Did they produce crap boards for the $$ after the nForce4 series?

I had excellent luck with DFI back in the day, and stuck with them for 3 generations - I had an nForce2 Ultra Infinity, which rocked so much that when I went to s754 I picked up a Lanparty nf3 250gb. Liked that one so much I bought my current nf4 Ultra-D when I went s939.

After 3 generations of class leading motherboards, what happened? I know the DFI's weren't perfect, both the Ultra Infinity and my current Ultra-D have quirks that I had to work around, but they were both very good boards.

The Ultra-D has been kicking it for almost 2 years now, overclocked all the time it's on, and the Ultra Infinity is still chugging along in my sisters rig, it's XP-M plugging away at 2.6ghz.

Who screwed up?

[sswilson]

DFI had a great run with Nvidia chipset A64 boards, but never really had a strong Intel contender.....

When the P965 Dark was released it caused a bit of a stir, but it was plagued with extreme board whine which sent everybody packing.

Keep in mind that support for the enthusiast market has changed an awful lot since the glory days of the Ultra-D... Back then DFI was really the only board manufacturer designing boards with bios' that allowed ultra-high voltage settings etc..... Now, everybody and their dog is producing enthusiast boards, and more often than not people are achieving the same kinds of overclocks without the headaches involved in navigating a DFI bios.

[Cptn Vortex]

I'm loving my X38....its stable as can be. Also the P35 Blood Iron was a good budget board. They have a lot of different models of the P45/X48 too, some of them are pretty out there.

[Andy]

I just got their P45 board a couple months ago and it has been rock solid so far. It was my first DFI board, and while somewhat intimidating at first, it seems to be a good match for my components.

[misterd]

They recently made a mATX p45 CF board that is supposed to be a monster overclocker, i wanted one for the HTPC but the AM2 way was so much cheaper for what it would be used for.

[Eldonko]

DFI specialized in AMD and it took them a bit to get established making Intel boards. Now they have a good range of boards offered but consistency in quality is lacking.

[Dead Things]

I will say this - I recently had an excellent experience with DFI technical support. "Whaaaa?" you say? I know, I know. But listen to this...

I've got a DFI LP 790FX-M2RS running a Phenom X4 9550. That board, as anybody who owns it knows, is a very good board with lousy BIOS support (a bit odd for DFI, considering BIOS is what they're known for). So I wrote to DFI with a laundry list of things I wanted included in the BIOS (including things as basic as hardware virtualization and a startup clock that would reset itself upon POST failure). Well, only about a week later - one of the DFI techs emailed me a custom-made BIOS with *ALL* of the revisions I asked for, and I can say all of them work perfectly. So in that sense, DFI retains its enthusiast-centric position in my opinion.

[Eldonko]

DFI tech support is great, but it is a different story if you try and RMA a board.

[encorp]

Actually, DFI's new X58 boards are something to behold, I was really impressed with their first offering (on paper) first board with both Xfire and SLI, Digitial PWM and amazinh layout, plus they are now designing their own heatpipes (versus using thermalright) and I think they got it right so far, as far as the BIOS we'll see how it goes when they release it around the 14th of next month; but I think with X58 you will definitely see an upgrade to DFI's popularity again.

[Eldonko]

Heh, thats what we thought with X48. ;) DFI is a company that the beta stuff that testers have is always awesome but the retail stuff is a different story. Have to wait and see I guess.