Intel 845 DDR Motherboard Roundup - December 2001

DFI NB70-SC

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Recently acquiring some marketing talent from ABIT, DFI is a company to watch over the coming year. While they've never been big in the enthusiast community (the NB70-SC being an example of why) they have a tremendous amount of potential since they know exactly where they should be headed. DFI's products have generally been very well built and solid performers without ever any stability concerns, yet they have never been big on overclocking or tweaking.

The feature-set of the NB70-SC is not much different from the Chaintech 9BJD0 in that it is a very simple board with no support for voltage adjustment. FSB frequencies up to 132MHz are offered, but nothing above that.

The onboard audio is driven by the popular Avance Logic ALC201 AC'97 codec. The 2-channel codec is the most advanced produced under the Avance Logic name (a brand of Realtek) and offers SPDIF output support that is fully AC'97 2.2 compliant. Although DFI didn't bundle the board with a SPDIF output header, very few would end up using the connector. The main differences between the ALC201 and the cheaper ALC100 codec are the use of 18-bit DACs (vs 16-bit in the ALC100) and a higher signal to noise ratio. The SPDIF output is also a feature the ALC201 codec offers over the ALC100.

The NB70-SC passed all of our tests without a hitch.