DFI

History

DFI was first established in 1981 by Y.C Lu. At that time, DFI began as a graphics card maker with a turnover of 100 cards. In 1992, DFI abandoned its graphics card production and switched to the production of motherboards as the graphics card market was too limited at the time and did not have potential to grow. After 5 years, DFI quickly gained a reputation in the Asia-Pacific region. It peaked as high as one of the top 15 motherboard manufacturers at that time.

In 1998, DFI became the sole design partner for the Intel 810 series chipset, which gained more attention. In 2003, DFI internally reorganised its line into 3 distinct groups. One was the standard OEM line, another is the Infinity budget range, and the last as the LANParty range. The head of the LANParty range was Oskar Wu, who joined DFI after he resigned from ABIT after the NForce series.

Currently, as of 2006, DFI had left being one of the most competitive manufacture as it used to be in 90's, as of 2009 DFI told its LANParty team there would be no more LANParty products. They now specialized in some industrial computing and legacy parts for old computers.

Name

Recently there has been confusion over what DFI means, however Design for Innovation appears to simply be a slogan, a situation with close parallels to Lucky Goldstar with their slogan of Life's Good and Micro-Star International's slogan of My Style Inside.

Actually, DFI, stands for Diamond Flower International. Diamond Flower being the name of David and YC Lu's mother, translated from mandarin.

Location

DFI is located in Hsi-Chih City, Taiwan with regional offices in the United States, Europe, China and Japan.

Popular products

DFI caters to the enthusiast market with motherboards with advanced overclocking features and a design with ultraviolet-reactive connectors on a black PCB. There are two versions of the LANParty line with the UT similar to the full LANParty gear except for the omission of the PC Transpo bag, UV sleeving kit, FrontX Panel, and less UV-reactant cables.

DFI introduced their Junior lineup in the mid summer of 2008 with two products, p45 and 790gx, but have somewhat been extended with a nvidia chipset and X58 chipset in late 2008. The junior lineup "JR" is micro-ATX and they usually support Crossfire or SLI setups with dual-slot videocards. This series has proven to be a valuable segment in the future for small, powerful computers. However, they don't contain the same power circuitry ("VRM/PWM") and BIOS options as their full-sized "ATX" counterparts.

There are other LanParty series like LT and DK(Dark). Lanparty UT is still the most high end line of products and few chipsets are reserved under the name.

The different variants include some of these popular products in the Lanparty series:

Socket AM3

Socket AM2/AM2+

Socket AM2

Socket 939

Socket 754

Socket A (462)

Socket T (LGA775)

Socket (LGA1366)

Socket (LGA1156)

DFI also has another line primarily aimed at budget overclockers. This line is the "Infinity"/"Bloodiron", which started with the nForce 2. The "Bloodiron" is just the Infinity series renamed.

AMD lineup

Intel lineup

DFI is also manufacturing various motherboards for mainstream users. This product line is the "General" line. For those wanting to build silent computers, there is a product line called "Silent PC".

DFI-ACP

DFI is also manufacturing motherboards for various industrial purposes. DFI-ACP is a Wintel based platform provider for non-PC business, products range from board level, open frame, add-on boards to barebone systems.