DFI NFII Ultra: Mean Green Dream Machine
by Wesley Fink on July 30, 2003 6:25 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
DFI NFII Ultra LanParty: Board Layout
The DFI NFII Ultra, like other LanParty boards, has an excellent layout. We have yet to see the perfect motherboard, however, so we do have a few minor annoyances to report.
More and more top-end AMD motherboards are implementing both the standard ATX 20-pin connector and the 4-pin 12-volt connector that are part of the Pentium 4 Power Supply specification. DFI has provided both connectors on the NFII. The location of the 20-pin is virtually ideal – to the right of the DIMM slots at the top corner. This is a great location for most case designs - even full towers. Although the 4-pin 12V connector is in a common location to the left of the CPU socket we prefer the 12V to the right of the CPU socket between the CPU and DIMM slots, and as close to the top of the board as possible. The DFI worked fine with the single ATX connection, but we ran all benchmarks with both the ATX and secondary 12V connector. The DFI was built for overclocking, and the 12V connector will likely increase board stability in extreme overclocking situations.
It is easy to argue both sides of DFI’s decision to use a huge passive heatsink for the nForce2 Ultra 400 Northbridge. Some will prefer the passive heatsink, while others would prefer active cooling. The proof, in the end, is how effective the solution works. We had no problems whatsoever, even overclocking as high as 228 FSB, with overheating of the heatsink. Please also take note of the cute little heatsink that DFI has applied to the power transistor, below left of the heatsink. This has been a component that often gets hot on other nForce2 boards, and we are happy to see DFI add cooling to this component. It seems to work well and stay reasonably cool.
One concern with a large passive heatsink, particularly those mounted diagonally like the nFoece2 boards, is whether large heatsinks will fit. The Thermalright SK-7, which uses a clip for connection, fit with no problem at all – even with an 80mm fan attached. However, there are no mounting holes around the CPU socket, which will be important to some. Several water-cooling blocks and a few very large heatsinks require the four mounting holes for proper setup. The mounting holes are not part of the current AMD specification, but boards targeting the enthusiast market would do well to include the mounting holes to avoid customer disappointment.
The Floppy connector and Primary/Secondary IDE connectors are in the ideal position - closer to the top of the board and to the right of the DIMM slots. This will allow IDE cables to reach the upper bays of almost any case design. Depending on your case design, you will either love or hate the IDE RAID connector locations. If you have a case with drive bays to the right of the motherboard, the location at the bottom right of the board will seem ideal. If your hard drives must mount in the upper bays of a tower case, you will probably wonder what DFI was thinking in their design. For the majority of case designs, the lower right location for hard-drive-only connections makes more sense.
Abit received a lot of positive comments when they began putting momentary power and reset switches on their top-line overclocking boards. Everyone raved about this nice touch for the serious computer hobbyist. Well, good ideas tend to get adopted by others, and DFI has included push-button Power and Reset switches on the NFII Ultra. In fact, DFI is using the switches as part of their signature design for the LanParty boards. The onboard switches are just another touch to let the end-user know that this is a board designed for serious computer users.
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Anonymous User - Friday, August 1, 2003 - link
This article is useless because it doesn't help anyone that is looking for a high-end board.
1.Readers want to see how it compares in games! Even though it is stated that different video cards are used, these numbers do not help anyone.
2.Readers want to see how it compares against other top of the line boards! (why not compare it against a P3, it would be just as usefull!)
3."Performance tests for the DFI NFII Ultra LanParty were run with the ATI 9800 PRO 128MB video card with AGP Aperture set to 32MB"
AGP Aperture set to 32MB??? Most people would set this to 128MB! Is there a compatibility problem that should of been stated?
This article should either be fixed or removed from AnandTech's website as it is damaging to their reputation.
If nothing is done about this article then it shows how much AnandTech listens to it's readers.
-no insult intended towards anyone-
Anonymous User - Friday, August 1, 2003 - link
This article is a bit low on quality. Visiting the forums I know there are tons of qualified guys/gals that would love, including myself, to write/work at anand. I can't believe that this new guy was the best thing they found. I agree with other comments posted. I also hate with a passion the new benchmark result that are used in some of the article, some were flash... I restrict what runs on my browser because I hate to see a woman f****** a cow when I browse. What happened to the plain jpeg/gif of the past? Would much prefer that since otherwise no point of reading the articleAnonymous User - Friday, August 1, 2003 - link
just wanted to respond to number 18, who quoted one of my comments.Actually man, I have been a NVIDIA fan and own several NVIDIA products. However as with most of us gamers you have to go where the speed, performance and quality is. I do own a 9700 pro and currently use it for my main gaming, but then again why not? does NVIDIA produce anything that compares?
NVIDIA has had their last 2 product lines fail, along with there cheats and shortcuts to produce good numbers. I seem to remember another company that did those things, can we say 3DFX? Who baught them???? NVIDIA.
my point was not that i am biased, but that ATI is currently the top of the line for speed, quality and performance, besides the fact it supports the new directx9.
which is better to do tests on after all, outdated and slow technology, or up to date top of the line technology?
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
Jeez, why would anyone even bother writing articles for such ungrateful SOBsAnonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
I may have missed it, but how much is this thing gonna cost?justly - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
There is an explanation about the scores, at the bottom of the preformance test configuration page you can read this"Many benchmarks show widely different results with different video hardware, so we have indicated benchmarks run with the ATI Radeon 9800 PRO with an asterisk. Benchmarks without an asterisk were run with the nVidia Ti4600."
Iam glad to see the move to the ATi 9800 Pro, this eliminates any video bottleneck and allowes for 8X AGP compatibility testing.
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
This article really needs fixin!First major complaint is the use of old graphics cards. Compare apples to apples. Not apples to oranges to peaches.
Second, the Asus A78NX was not tested either. This IS the gold standard with AMD enthusiasts. How can we make a good comparison?
Third, where are the game tests and 3D Mark scores?
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
In response to #6(Wesley):I'm not saying your numbers are wrong, I'm saying your description seems wrong. As #21 points out, that description makes absolutely no sense, and as far as I've read, it's wrong. RAID 1.5 is a RAID 1 mirror with "optimized" reads; nothing more. Check Tom's Hardware, I believe they have a good article on this.
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
Umm....Striping and mirroring with 2 drives only?OK...Let's look at this the way he explained it:
Take 2, 80 GB drives...
Half of each contains is striped, the other half used to mirror the stripe.
In what way is this useful? If 1 drive fails, you've lost the stripe AND the useless mirror...
Please explain to me why this is a good thing, Anandtech....
-Phil Green
LM Information Systems
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
ok i wont comment the different video cards used, im sure you realise this isn't right... especially for the games benches.hopefully you'll make up, testing the other boards with this raddy too... also all tests that were done on just this board shall be done to the rest of the boards in time... when you fix all these things i hope you'll put up some notice on the main page.
i got a major complaint however... the idea to use flash for displaying the graphs isn't good at all. the newest flash plugins for mozilla are incredibly slow, and almost make my pc freeze as i open multiple tabs with your articles(with at least 2 flash adds on each page) so i prefer to disable my flash plugin. i know i dont represent the majority of your readers here, so i'm not important... but yet i think you should consider simple gifs for your graphs.
now another thing... why does the forum open in such a weird window? i mean, no addressbar and toolbar, etc. thats kinda annoying.
now a question about the test results... i find some specview results quite weird. in a couple if tests the dfi scores quite less than the rest, and then there's that test where dfi scores 5 times more than the rest.... i'd like to read your comment on these tests, hopefully you have some explanation.
bye folks, and forgive my bitching :) inspite it, i do like your site and thank you for the articles. you're doing a great job