DFI has decided to start dropping many of the legacy ports from the LanParty UT NF4 SLI-DR motherboard. Previously, the rear I/O panel would feature several serial ports, a printer port plus the keyboard and mouse ports. Now all tracers of serial and printer ports are gone, replaced by the ever increasing number of external peripheral connectors.
On the left side of the picture is the USB, FireWire and Ethernet connectors. There are two Ethernet ports on the board as it has two gigabit interfaces. One is the NVIDIA port that also uses the ActiveArmor firewall and the other is a Marvell gigabit interface. I'm not quite sure why most consumers would need two Ethernet ports, but DFI does offer it. There are also six USB 2.0 ports which is very useful as many more peripherals are external now instead of installed into the computer case.
In the center of the picture is the Karajan audio module. This is a small PCB that is installed into a connector on the motherboard and features six mini-jack audio connectors to properly run a 6-channel audio configuration The odd thing is that is a removable module from the board. This implies that the user has a choice to not use it and put something else in its place. But if the user does not have it installed, there is a big hole in the back of the case. The digitial coax connectors are also wired to the motherboard and not the module.
