I eventually got in contact with DFI's tech support department. Unfortunately it was by directly e-mailing one of their techs which is not standard procedure (although they assure me that techsupport@dfiweb.com works). Their suggestion was to set the MAC address in the BIOS. That sounds strange, but is indeed an option under the 'Genie BIOS' menu. There are two stickers on the AGP slot with the MAC addresses for both cards. Unfortunately they are not labeled, but if you load the RealTek driver and then run 'ipconfig /all' you can see which one is assigned to it. That leaves the other MAC address for the nForce LAN. Once programmed, I was able to get an IP from DHCP and browse to my heart's content.

Now this all sounds great except for the little issue that most users will not ever think to do this. The stickers have 12 numbers on them and nothing else, there is no indication that they are the MAC addresses for the network controllers. The documentation that came with the board makes no mention that those are MAC addresses and when have you ever had to manually set the MAC address on a network controller to make it work? These are steps that no user should have to go through to make some of the most basic functionality of their motherboard work. I can only hope that noone else will have this problem; indeed, none of the other review sites mention it. But if you do, then maybe this information will help if, like me, you have trouble contacting DFI's tech support department.



Link: The Tech Lounge