A LANparty is a gathering of gamers who all carry their PCs to the venue and proceed to 'frag' and 'vape' their way through the weekend against dozens or hundreds of their fellow geeks in networked games over a LAN.

Although DFI has used the 875P chipset in this LANparty Pro875, it is going for the enthusiast market, rather than the workstation market, and the emphasis is on gaming and cosmetic appearance, with a few gimmicks thrown in for good measure.

The first gimmick is a carrying strap, named PC Transpo, so you can lug your beige tower around more easily. Well, we say gimmick, but one or two of you may find it useful. The other marketing ploy is that all the lurid orange components fluoresce under a cold cathode light. Clearly that's only of interest to the case modders among you who have a window in the side of your case and enjoy modifying your PC as much as you do playing games.

The package also includes a device called FrontX that mounts in an external 5.25-inch drive bay and carries headphone and microphone mini-jacks, two USB 2.0 ports and a Firewire port for ease of connection.

As this is the most expensive board in the group, it is a major boon that it is also very fast in both Sysmark and 3D Mark terms. It has a number of features including a row of diagnostic LEDs to report error codes, and it also has micro buttons for Power and Reset, which are handy if you're working with the board outside of a case, as we know some of you will.

Using a combination of ICH5R and a Highpoint HPT372N chip, the LANparty Pro875 supports plenty of drives, much like the majority of this group. While this is an impressive motherboard, the price is rather high we're not sure that it's entirely merited, leaving aside the case-modding crew.