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DFI LANPARTY UT NF680i LT SLI-T2R Mainboard: Choice of Free, Wealthy and Dedicated Enthusiasts (page 14)

Category: Mainboards

by Doors4ever

[ 07/27/2007 | 04:54 PM ]

Conclusion

And now, for those who don’t read the articles but only look through the conclusions and picture, we would like to sum up the results of our today’s detailed discussion of DFI LANPARTY UT NF680i LT SLI-T2R mainboard features and performance. The mainboard makes a very good impression, boasts very rich BIOS functionality, works great with the memory, but:

• Cannot accommodate any processor cooler;
• Features very noisy fan on the South Bridge cooler;
• Uses very hot Nvidia chipset, its “lite” modifications, to be more exact;
• Has some bugs and strange effects in the BIOS;
• Offers very complicated processor overclocking experience;
• Doesn’t work with the FSB set between 400MHz and 475MHz;
• Yields to solutions on competing chipsets during overclocking.

There is an opinion that you should use expensive mainboards to overclock expensive processors. Why save on small things, if you got an expensive board, buy one of the top CPUs and you won’t be dealing with issues at up to 500MHz FSB and up. But wait a minute, if DFI LANPARTY UT NF680i LT SLI-T2R doesn’t really work in a pretty large frequency range from 400 to 475MHz FSB, what processor can you actually use with it? You may start experiencing problems not only during overclocking of the youngest Core 2 Duo processors using 7x multiplier. Even CPUs with 8x multiplier may stall at the modest 3.2GHz speed. And taking into account that the new processor core revisions boast much higher overclocking potential than the previous ones, the problems may even occur with the CPUs supporting 9x clock frequency multiplier.

Processor overclocking is a pretty unpredictable thing that depends not only on skill and experience but also on luck. As a rule, you don’t have the chance to choose the most overclockable processor from the batch. You overclock whatever you’ve got. But when it comes to mainboards, you shouldn’t rely on luck here, but take into account the performance results and products reviews, to make sure that the board you choose doesn’t ruin the potential of a good CPU, doesn’t become a bottleneck during overclocking experiments.

This is when a logical question pops up: who might actually need a mainboard like DFI LANPARTY UT NF680i LT SLI-T2R? I believe that the potential DFI LANPARTY UT NF680i LT SLI-T2R owner should have enough free time to find the most optimal parameters for his system. Besides, he should be quite wealthy to afford processors with at least 10x clock frequency multiplier or have CPUs with an unlocked multiplier. And of course, he should be a dedicated enthusiast, because only dedicated enthusiasts can never be satisfied with a single graphics card; they always need two. Or at least, he should dislike ATI/AMD and Intel chipsets enough.

However, common sense suggests that these requirements are not everything that should be mentioned in this respect. Nvidia nForce 680i SLI based mainboards, just like powerful GeForce 8800 graphics cards have been in the market for over half a year now. I believe that true enthusiasts have already got themselves a nice set. So, our potential DFI LANPARTY UT NF680i LT SLI-T2R owner should also be not only free, dedicated and wealthy, he should also be a DFI fan. If you are the guy, then DFI LANPARTY UT NF680i LT SLI-T2R would be a great choice for you :)