Conclusion
DFI's LANPARTY PRO875B Canterwood motherboard is solid, dependable board that doesn't quite shine in enough areas to make it stand out from the competition. Apart from the peerless bundle and excellent board-specific overclocking DFI doesn't quite do enough in other areas. For example, the feature count is, somewhat inexplicably, missing FireWire support. It's hard to see why. The BIOS is also pretty good (CMOS Reloaded is a nice touch) but not amazing. There's no on-the-fly settings or fan-control options present. We're being picky, of course, but a board positioned at the top of a company's S478 hierarchy shouldn't compromise on any facet, we feel.That's our lamentations out of the way. Good is to be found in the general layout and feature choice (excepting FireWire's omission). We like DFI's choice of allowing both native SATA and discrete PATA RAID. Sound is above average and the Northbridge-attached Gigabit Ethernet is a true i875P feature. DFI's PRO875B bundle is another selling point. As we have seen, performance at stock speeds was just a hair's breadth behind an ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard, but there wasn't enough of a difference to cause alarm.
DFI's produced another well-rounded motherboard that demands to be shortlisted for top-end S478 machines. Priced in the neighbourhood of £120, it also represents good i875P value. Our reservations lie in the lack of advancement from the incumbent PRO875 (just CMOS Reloaded, which is a simple BIOS update) and the lack of onboard FireWire support. When it all comes down to it and we're being brutally honest, DFI's simply not done enough to call this a 'B' revised model.
