DFI nForce4: SLI and Ultra for Mad Overclockers
by Wesley Fink on February 5, 2005 9:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
General Performance & Encoding
The DFI nForce4 is competitive with other Athlon 64 boards in Business and Multi-Media Winstones, but it is hardly a standout performer as it is in gaming benchmarks. The DFI does, however, perform exceptionally well compared to the nForce4 Reference and other Athlon 64 boards in PCMark 2004 and the 2-pass Auto GK Media Encoding benchmark. It is clear that DFI is continuing to tweak stock performance as the stock scores in these benchmarks are much improved over results that we have seen from DFI in the past.
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rjm55 - Wednesday, February 2, 2005 - link
It looks like your praise for the DFI riled the competition in #26. Frankly it is good to see your enthusiasm for the DFI. It is nice to see some excitement come through in the review.Over the years of reading your reviews I've learned that if you get excited it's a product I'll be very happy with. I just wish you could persuade DFI to use a VIA Vinyl codec instead of that very pedestrian Realtek 850. It's a shame to waste the potential of the Audio Module on the 850. This board deserves better.
bupkus - Wednesday, February 2, 2005 - link
Oops, my bad. I need to wait until Epox releases their nForce4.Illissius - Wednesday, February 2, 2005 - link
Awesome board. Unfortunately, not perfect. I find the following faults with it:- The second GbE is PCI and not PCIe.
- It uses the same crappy Realtek audio everyone else does, rather than Creative SBLive (a la MSI SLI) or VIA Envy24PT.
- Its color scheme is not blue thingies-that-are-not-the-PCB on a black PCB.
These shortcomings conspire to demote it from the status of 'awesomest motherboard in the history of history' to 'best A64 motherboard thus far, and possibly ever'.
Have a nice day :D.
As for the review; for the most part great, except... using 61.77 drivers for everything else, and 71.40 for the nForce4, probably invalidates all the gaming scores, as there have been significant performance improvements from the 61.77 to the 66.93, and I would imagine the 71.40 doesn't regress in this regard.
Also, I'm interested in the maglev chipset cooler. Is there any visual difference from a standard cooler? Is it quieter, at least?
bupkus - Wednesday, February 2, 2005 - link
Was there anything good about the competition? Were they cheaper and almost as good, like a second place winner for us cheap economy guys. How about the Epox?knitecrow - Wednesday, February 2, 2005 - link
The DFI board is very nice, and if anyone is going to overclock, this board is the one to get. For non-overclockers, MSI board looks good as well.The chipset fan seems gimicky, I wish it had a bigger heatsink with a more efficient fan.
I am reading correctly between the lines? Is Nvidia charging some insane SLI tax? I like to see what DFI can do with the upcomming ATI chipset for athlon64.
I can tell you from personal experience that the realtek ALC850 (also used on my DFI UT nF3 250GB) is absolute crap. And I am not being picky either. My old soundblaster 16 sounds better. Gone are the days of good audio on the NFII. There are SO many better choices, why not go with a better AC'97 codec? Via Vinyl, sigmatel, cirius logic?
Its really dumb to go through all the trouble of having an add-in card and then use the worst AC'97 codec chip on the market.
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, February 2, 2005 - link
#39 - The FrontX is a "breakout box" that installs in a drive bay and provides front audio, usb, firewire, and SATA ports in this design. FrontX also features diagnostic LEDs that tell you how the board is functioning.We covered FrontX in detail in past LANParty reviews which you can look up at AnandTech. It is a modular design. You can also find more info at www.frontx.com
SPDIF is a digital audio input and output. I'm sure others here will explain more about SPDIF.
DeanO - Wednesday, February 2, 2005 - link
Does anyone know what the FrontX and Diagnostic LED Connector, that are included with the SLI-DR motherboard, do?The manual says:
One FrontX device equipped with:
- 4 diagnostic LEDs, 1 S/PDIF-out, 1 mini 1394 port and 1 Serial ATA port
The article doesn't seem to mention it anywhere, and neither does the DFI website.
What do the LEDs do? And what is an S/PDIF-out?
Thanks ~ DeanO
Aileur - Wednesday, February 2, 2005 - link
Any idea how much the SLI bridge will go for, seperately?I can see it being as much as 20$, bringing the price difference between real SLI and modded SLI to a point where youd have to ask yourself, do i wanna risk it.
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, February 2, 2005 - link
#35 - 318 (DDR636) is the highest clock speed we have acheived with THIS memory at 1T with DS dimms in dual-channel mode AT ANANDTECH. The previous 1T record with this setup was 295.We are aware you can reach higher speeds with single-sided dimms and a single dimm, but users don't generally run their machines with 2 256MB SS dimms. We have seen reports of memory speeds of DDR680 and even higher with single-sided dimms.
You can also reach higher speeds with a configuration with water-cooling or phase-change cooling or liquid nitrogen.
The important thing in our opinion is performance with the exact same setup, and here the DFI reached new performance levels with this memory and this CPU with air cooling.
mctmcpoop - Wednesday, February 2, 2005 - link
318 is not the highest record ...The HTT record of this board is 456mhz ...
http://www.coolaler.com/ipb/index.php?showtopic=37...
The 1:1 DRAM record is DDR750 ...
http://www.coolaler.com/ipb/index.php?showtopic=38...