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| DFI LAN Party UT NF4 UltraD And then we modded it ... | |
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(Review by MS, Dec 4, 2005) |
| AMD Athlon64 X2-3800+ |
Summary
In insider circles, DFI boards have attained an almost legendary reputation for overclocking, courtesy of excellence in the quality of components and a cornucopia of BIOS settings that allow every possible trick and tweak in the book. Particularly, the LAN Party series has made its entry into the hall of fame on more than one occasion, regardless of whether it was memory bandwidth or raw clock speed competitions. At the same time, the LAN Party series sports a very sensible bundle of accessories, not to much, not too little either. Not all that glitters is gold, though, certain things, as we found out, are to be taken with more than one grain of salt.
None of this matters too much for those in search of an inexpensive SLI killer board. The LAN Party UltraD can easily be converted into a fully functional SLI motherboard, moreover, the board is blazingly fast by default. In the end, based on performance and stability, the LAN Party UltraD pretty much redeems itself - as long as one is aware of some minor issues.
It was not long ago, that DFI was primarily an OEM manufacturer of motherboards sharing their lack of inspiration with the typical OEM consumer who - to bring back the old Tropicana Twister commercial - lives his or her live according to the motto "We avoid temptation" … and buys a Dell computer. Things have changed quite a bit since, new engineers have come on board, new enthusiast lines of product have been created and a new marketing team is pushing the resulting flash and dance into the market.
Amongst other virtues, DFI has cultivated the art of product differentiation, there are the Infinity and the LAN Party lines, there are UT and other monikers and by the end of the day, there is a sizeable portfolio of product combinations like motherboard A with accessories B in color scheme C or vice versa. The result, beyond some initial confusion, is the possibility for each user to pick and choose whatever feature set is the most appropriate and suitable for the budget at hand.
The DFI LAN Party NF4 UltraD UT in regular light
With respect to the flash and dance, DFI were probably the first to come out grand scale with fluorescent components by using expansion slots impregnated with fluorescent dies and matching rounded cables to complete the picture. Needless to say that getting the effects still requires the use of a fluorescent light source, preferably black-light to bring out the glow-in-the-dark characteristics. Likewise, fluorescent dies are extremely short-lived, unless protected by antioxidants the life span is in the order of days at max but as long as there are enough of the LuciferYellow - derivatives incorporated into the plastic mold, chances are that the ghastly glow will last at least a few weeks. By then, the enthusiasm of staring at PCI slots and the same old cables will fade, along with the intensity of component visibility in an absence of light.
In a world where almost everybody takes a reference design and giveth a bit of the extra secret sauce or taketh a fraction of a penny at the expense of component quality, there does not appear to be much room to move. The biggest line items are the choice of the third party RAID controller, the firewire IC and the network Phy layer for interfacing the chipset level-integrated controller with the outside world. Realistically, with the introduction of e.g. nVidia's new chipsets, there is hardly any need for an additional RAID controller, the nForce4's SATA RAID controller is fast, supports all SATA extension features and who can house more than four drives in a case anyway. In comparison, the trusted SiliconImage 3114 controller - as much as we like it - has seen better days, especially in light of the fact that it interfaces with the PCI bus and, consequently, the backend is the main bottleneck. Bottomline is that unless there is a need for huge storage space, the additional RAID controller has become obsolete and only constitutes a financial legacy.
Another constantly evolving feature of modern motherboards has been the on-board sound. Most current chipsets feature one or the other form of AC'97 CODEC, relying on CPU cycles without dedicated hardware acceleration. There is still the question of which CODEC to use from the repertoire of SigmaTel, VIA or RealTek. The most commonly used solution appears at the time RealTek's ALC850 7.1 eight-channel audio, arguably a decent solution, albeit limited to 16-bit resolution and a sampling rate of no more than 48 kHz. Audio encoding/decoding quality aside, the biggest issue with many on-board solutions is the picking up interference signals, namely mouse clicks or hard disc / CD ROM spin-up in the form of cackling noise or else high-pitched tweets - whichever is more annoying.
Finally, there is the issue of user-accessible CMOS setup (BIOS) settings which has gone through excesses in either direction from non-existent to exuberance of non-functional placebo tabs for the sake of window dressing only. Arguably, there are novel features that are extremely welcome, especially the possibility of saving custom settings in a user profile - but then there is also a lot of pretense.
After that much of a preamble, we are looking at one of the insider-tip boards, that is, DFI's LAN Party UT NF4 Ultra-D. Briefly, the monikers designate the nForce4 Ultra chipset used with UV sensitive components (UV-On Tweak Fun !!) without 3rd party RAID controller. The sample we have at hand is actually a few months old but still in the current lineup of DFI boards.
| DFI LAN Party NF4 UltraD |
| DFI LanParty UT nF4 Ultra-D |
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