DFI LanParty NFII B Ultra Mainboard Review

by Yury Mitrofanov
02/08/2004 | 09:02 PM

The user community has been always watching closely NVIDIA’s actions in the chipset market. NVIDIA nForce2 provoked a kind of sensation, since it was the first chipset for Socket A platform capable of locking AGP/PCI frequencies, which mattered a lot for overclocking and wasn’t available by the VIA’s chipsets.

So, it was quite natural for many users to prefer nForce2-based mainboards those days. It turned out later, though, that the North Bridge of that chipset couldn’t work stably at 200MHz FSB frequency, but NVIDIA reacted very rapidly and released a revision of the chipset with this deficiency fixed.

Mainboard makers announced updated versions of their products adding to their names something like “rev. 2.0”. This marking indicated the new North Bridge that was stable at a FSB frequency of 200MHz and higher. It was often not only the chipset that changed, but also the wiring, component layout, cooling system and accessories. Major companies were the first to offer new products, and minor manufacturers followed the suit soon after. The Taiwanese DFI has also rolled out an updated product.

Well, welcome DFI LanParty NF II Ultra B mainboard.

Specifications

Even the most fastidious user should find the accessories included with the mainboard more than satisfactory. First of all, we have got a huge bright green box with a carry handle.

When you open the box, you see a small bag with jumpers and stickers (for the system case and with the “LanParty” logo).

There are 5 smaller boxes inside the big one. The PC Transpo is a bag in which you may want to carry your system case about. It’s quite a handy contraption.

The FrontX panel with I/O ports should be installed into a 5.25” bay of the system case. You can choose which exactly connectors it carries. We installed USB and FireWire connectors, audio jacks, a microphone input and a small diagnostics panel with four LEDs into our FrontX.

The round light-green aerodynamic cables (one IDE and one FDD) shine in ultraviolet light just like some of the mainboard components – a move towards modders. Regrettably, DFI was a bit stingy here as you usually use two IDE cables in the system, but the LanParty NFII Ultra B comes with only one aerodynamic IDE cable. Anyway, one is enough to attract attention to your system at first glance.

The next box contains such accessories as two SATA cables, a bracket with two FireWire ports, a power adapter for SATA HDDs, an I/O shield and thermal paste. The manufacturer was nice to include the thermal compound as it is often necessary when you replace your old mainboard.

The last box contains the mainboard itself. Here it is:

Besides the things enumerated above, we also receive:

• Two CDs and a floppy diskette with the standard set of drivers and utilities and InterVideo WinCinema;
• A Quick Installation Guide in English, French, German and Chinese;
• A user manual in English, French, German, Spanish and Russian;
• A brochure describing the mainboard features (in English).

A mainboard with such gorgeous accessories should offer widest opportunities at work. Let’s check out if that’s really so.

Closer Look

This mainboard is a full-featured product. It supports processors with 400MHz FSB in the first hand, so owners of top-end Athlon XPs won’t have any problems with it. This is only due to the new North Bridge: older mainboards would only support 333MHz FSB frequency.

If you are into manual tweaking of your hardware, you may find the two small buttons on the PCB very useful. They are Power and Reset.

There is a Silicon Image Sil3114 controller and four SerialATA connectors nearby. They allow building RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 arrays. As we have already mentioned several times in our previous articles, this controller from Silicon Image is not a hardware RAID controller: everything is implemented on the software level. Anyway, the speed of this solution is pretty high.

Note also that DFI gave up serving its exclusive dish: RAID 1.5 array. RAID 1.5 is in fact a modification of RAID 1 concept. With RAID 1, we have all data on one drive, while the other drive stores their copy. With RAID 1.5, we have half of the data stored on the first drive, and the other half on the second; the data are mirrored on the vacant half of the other drive. This solution was based on HighPoint 372N controller, which was the only one to offer this feature. Although RAID 1.5 is slightly faster than RAID 1, the lack of compatibility (you can’t read a RAID 1.5 array on a mainboard without the HighPoint controller) must have made this solution unpopular.

There are two network controllers on the mainboard: MCP-T South Bridge together with ICS1893 Phy chip provides Fast Ethernet (100Mbit/s), and Realtek RTL8110S controller gives you Gigabit Ethernet (1Gbit/s).

The mainboard boasts numerous I/O ports to connect external devices: 4 USB 2.0/1.1 ports, 2 FireWire ports, 1 COM, 1 LPT, PS/2 ports for the mouse and keyboard, S/PDIF connectors (input and output), line-out, line-in and mic-in jacks and two audio connectors for attaching the speakers (center/bass and rear out). The PCB also carries 2 USB and 1 FireWire connector that can be attached to the FrontX panel and an infrared port. This abundance of connectors should satiate every need of the most demanding user.

Like many other products, the DFI mainboard comes equipped with a six-channel AC’97 Realtek ALC650 codec. Although the chip has always been good, it is an out-dated solution already. Considering numerous innovations from Realtek, Analog Devices and VIA Technologies available in the market, it is strange that DFI implemented an older audio solution in its high-end mainboard.

If any hardware problems arise, the small diagnostics system may help. It consists of four onboard LEDs.

On the one hand, many mainboards come without any diagnostic tools, so it is nice we have one here, but on the other hand, a top-end mainboard might have been equipped with a small indicator of POST codes, which seems more optimal in this case.

PCB Design

Well, if I can say it about a mainboard then here it is: this mainboard is beautiful. The black textolite goes very nicely with the light-green components (they shine in ultraviolet light): AGP, PCI and DIMM slots, IDE and FDD connectors, the battery case. This mainboard looks like a unique thing. Of course, its looks will make it appeal to the modders.

The cooling system of the chipset is both good and bad. Yes, the high-profile passive cooler with a plenty of ribs on the North Bridge should provide efficient and noiseless cooling, while a heatsink on the South Bridge is more than enough (many manufacturers don’t mount any heatsink onto the South Bridge chip at all). On the other hand, you usually buy a top-end mainboard to overclock it. In this case, the North Bridge would feel much better if it had an active cooler on. The passive heatsink on the South Bridge could have been larger, with more ribs, too.

There are some more minor remarks about the component layout of the PCB. The 20-pin ATX power connector is placed correctly (the attached cable doesn’t hang above the CPU cooler), but the 4-pin connector is not. The CD-in and AUX-in connectors are close to the uttermost PCI slot. Many users don’t use them, but if you do, you will have to run the cables through the entire case. The placement of the FDD and IDE connectors is questionable, too. I think it would be better if the IDE1 connector were at the bottom of the PCB and the FDD – in the middle. This change would allow an ideal placement of the cables, ensuring better airflow inside the case.

However, these are all minor inconveniences compared to the real problem that you are likely to encounter when installing the mainboard with the CPU and cooler already on. The problem is that the CPU socket is too close to the left edge of the PCB. This makes it difficult to fasten the leftmost screw and also limits your choice of coolers: a big cooler may just not fit onto the mainboard. Although there are four mounting holes for massive coolers on the PCB, you are unlikely to use them…

One COM port was sacrificed to make enough room for the S/PDIF connectors. You may consider this no great loss (ABIT ships its MAX series mainboards without any LPT or COM ports at all). However, many users still use devices like a COM mouse or a serial external modem. If you discover that you lack a COM port, you will have to change your peripheral, I am afraid. They might have placed a COM connector onboard, or at least add a bracket with a COM port to the accessories. For example, this is what we see in 8RDA3 mainboards from EPoX: the back panel of the mainboard doesn’t carry COM or LPT ports, but you can get 1 COM and 1 LPT port by installing the bracket included into the mainboard package. If necessary, you can buy one more bracket to implement the second COM: there is an appropriate connector onboard. The DFI engineers didn’t do anything of those: no onboard connector, no second COM port.

DFI LanParty NFII Ultra B doesn’t avoid the common problem with the fan connectors. They are at the lower edge of the PCB, rather than in the middle or on the left. This means the fan cables should go through the entire system case. It is not critical for the back panel as far as the airflow is concerned, but there is nothing where you could fix the cable. So, the cable will be hanging loosely, which is not quite right. And if you run the cable to the front panel and then down, you may find that the cable is too short.

Overall, the PCB design of DFI LanParty NFII Ultra B could have been called good, if it were not for the problem with the socket location. That’s why I think that DFI engineers have only met the user’s needs halfway.

BIOS and Overclocking

There are many new things waiting for you in the BIOS. First of all, we have got the exclusive technology from DFI called CMOS Reloaded for saving BIOS presets in the flash memory and choosing any of them when necessary. That’s of course useful if you run your computer in different operational modes like at overclocked or regular frequencies. The technology takes up a full page in the BIOS:

The user can select the necessary preset at the system startup, without even entering the BIOS: just push a numerical button (1, 2, 3 or 4) and the mainboard loads up the corresponding preset.

The Advanced Chipset Features page allows you fine-tuning memory-related settings. The settings are really comprehensive:

Mainboards from ABIT have a SoftMenu page, while DFI LanParty NF II Ultra B has a “Genie Bios Setting” one.

From here you can:

• Adjust the FSB frequency from 100 to 300MHz. It’s highly improbable you can hit the ceiling, but it is possible to reach something like 250MHz by raising the voltage of the chipset’s North Bridge and improving its cooling.
• Change the CPU multiplier to any value from 5 to 22. This is good for overclocking, if you have an unlocked processor (modern processors from AMD usually come with a locked multiplier). Until now, only ABIT mainboards offered this feature. Still, you should be aware that FSB-overclocking of the CPU is more rewarding than setting a higher CPU multiplier. So, I would consider it more of a marketing trick.
• Vary the AGP frequency. You can clock the bus independently, or in relation to the FSB frequency. Unlike the AGP, the PCI bus is locked at 33MHz in nForce2-based mainboards; it doesn’t depend on the FSB and you cannot control its frequency.
• Adjust the memory frequency divisor. You can make the memory work at a frequency higher or lower than the FSB frequency, or synchronously with it. It is convenient that the BIOS shows you the resulting memory frequency.
• Adjust the Vcore from 1.0 to 2.0V with 0.025V stepping. The range seems to be wide, but you are unlikely to get lower than 1.25-1.3V, while the upper limit may be not enough for extreme overclocking. This is hardly a crucial drawback, but you should keep this fact in mind.
• Adjust the Vmem from 2.6V to 3.3V with 0.1V increment. So, high a ceiling for the Vmem is a claim for extremity.
• Adjust the Vagp from 1.5 to 1.8V with 0.1V increment.
• Adjust the voltage of the chipset’s North Bridge from 1.6V to 1.9V with 0.1V increment. You may want to increase this voltage to reach higher frequencies of the FSB.

This BIOS section also includes options for controlling FireWire, SATA and network controllers, for changing the full-screen BIOS image and for protecting the BIOS from re-flashing. This is rather strange, as we got used to seeing such options in Advanced BIOS Features and Advanced Chipset Features pages. By breaking this unwritten rule they make the user browse through all the pages searching for the necessary one: it’s usually not where you would expect it to be.

It’s also strange that we have no temperature control option in the PC Health Status page, which would turn the computer off after a certain critical temperature has been reached. In other words, we don’t have any overheat protection in an overclocking friendly mainboard! Of course, the PC will be shut down when the CPU is 110°C hot, but that’s not a reassuring fact, since the processor may fail even at 85-90°C.

Yet another drawback is the fact that the BIOS displays processor frequency instead of its rating when you set up a non-standard FSB frequency. For example, our processor was identified wrongly when we set its 2200MHz as 220x10.

In case of over-overclocking, or if you set up incorrect parameters in the BIOS and the system doesn’t boot up, you may press and hold the Ins key on startup. By doing this you reset CPU and memory parameters so that the computer could start and let you enter the BIOS Setup. That’s a useful option many manufacturers forget to implement in their mainboards. As for clearing the CMOS memory up, you can do it by pressing the Pause key.

So let’s check out the capabilities of the BIOS during overclocking. We can overclock the processor by increasing the FSB frequency or by setting a higher CPU multiplier. It’s all right with the multipliers: the mainboard supports them all including 22x. It was worse with FSB overclocking: the mainboard was stable in the dual-channel mode (both synchronous and asynchronous) at a frequency of 225MHz. when we set higher frequency the mainboard refused to even start. It is a rather average result I should say. Flagship products from ABIT and EPoX reach as high as 230-235MHz. Thus, DFI’s mainboard showed exactly what I had been expecting: average overclockability. Of course, I would like to see higher frequencies, but there are no miracles here.

Performance

We took one of the fastest nForce2-based mainboard, ABIT NF7-S to participate in our test session together with our today’s hero from DFI. This way we will be able to estimate if DFI engineers managed to achieve the appropriate performance level. The testbed was configured as follows:

• Athlon XP 3200+ CPU;
• 2x256MB PC3700 DDR SDRAM from OCZ;
• ATI RADEON 9700 PRO graphics card.

We used the chipset driver version 3.13 and the graphics card driver version 3.10. The memory worked in the synchronous mode with 2-4-4-9 timings.

The following table shows you the performance results in different applications:

DFI LanParty NFII Ultra B mainboard is fast enough to compete with the renowned mainboard from ABIT. So we can conclude that the engineering team from DFI did a great job.

Conclusion

DFI LanParty NFII Ultra B mainboard was intended to be an excellent high-end mainboard, complemented by its stylish looks, rich accessories and interesting features. On the other hand, the idea was almost ruined by the above mentioned drawbacks (imperfect PCB design, average FSB overclocking opportunities). I can’t recommend you this mainboard if you are a dedicated overclocker. Although, an ordinary user may like it a lot. Just weigh all pros and contras and make up your mind!

Highs:

• Good performance at nominal frequencies;
• Stylish exterior;
• Rich accessories;
• SerialATA RAID controller supporting up to four HDDs;
• Gigabit network controller;
• Numerous I/O ports.

Lows:

• High price (about $120-130);
• Some issues about the PCB design;
• You may find it difficult to install a massive CPU cooler;
• Poor overclockability;
• Insufficient protection against CPU overheating.

P.S.: By the way, I found a funny thing when reading through the documentation for this mainboard. Just take a look at the snapshot from the user manual: it illustrates the CPU installation process for DFI LanParty NFII Ultra B. Just note what processor they recommend you should use with this mainboard! :)