DFI LanParty NForce II Ultra Revision B

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Nicholas Hart
Kurtis
DFI
Jul. 23, 2004

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Overclocking

If you read the review of the NFII Ultra Rev A you should recall that it was an excellent overclocking board. So of course I have high expectations for the Rev B as well. I don't know all the changes that were made "under the hood' to the Rev B NFII Ultra, but I certainly hope overclocking performance does not suffer.

Our Athlon 1700+ runs stock at 1466MHZ with a 133FSB and multiplier of 11. With the Rev A board we attained 2250MHZ with 250FSB and a multiplier of nine. I could not duplicate those numbers with the Rev B, but that does not mean to say that I could not equal them. Overclocking an Athlon is a bit more flexible than with an Intel processor and I simply took a different approach to the issue.

Initially I left the voltages to default of 1.5v CPU and 2.6v DIMM. With these voltages I could easily hit 200FSB with a multiplier of nine. Yes that's only 1800MHZ total but still a decent overclock especially considering the stock heatsink cooler didn't even feel warm. Going beyond 200FSB required some voltage tweaking and thus increased the CPU temperature a noticeable amount. In the end I was able to reach 2300MHZ with 230FSB and a multiplier of ten using 1.75v CPU and 2.8v DIMM. The heatsink was quite hot but the system was stable. Consider that the Athlon XP 2800+ only runs at 2250MHZ and this is quite an achievement using only stock cooling.

In looking around the web at various overclocking sites, I see a lot of Athlon XP 1700+ overclocks in the 3GHZ range using a CPU voltage of 1.9. I was not about to try this without a more robust cooling solution, but I am confident that with proper chipset and processor cooling I could have run the system even harder.

Conclusion

It's hard to give an opinion on a board when I cannot get all the components to work correctly. In addition to my LAN problems, I also received two "CMOS battery failed' messages during my testing. I would really believe that maybe the battery had indeed failed except that I only got the error twice out of many, many reboots and never after updating the BIOS to the latest version. I attempted to contact DFI tech support through the normal techsupport@dfiweb.com address. I didn't mention that I was writing a review, I only mentioned my problems and the steps taken to address them. It's now been a week without a reply, which, quite frankly, is unacceptable. This is a high-dollar item marketed to those who want the best and there should be support to back it up.

On the other side of the coin, we have reviewed many a DFI LanParty board without problems and they all performed well. Indeed this one works great so long as you only need a single LAN port. I consider my CMOS battery problem a non-issue since I haven't reproduced it with the latest BIOS update. This board ran stably, has a ton of features and the overclocking is top notch.

So, for my final thoughts! I honestly don't believe that every board will have the problems mine did and I do still think this is a great board. The features added in the Rev B, most notably the SATA RAID controller, add to an already attractive package. But since I cannot count on the support of DFI in case of a problem, be absolutely sure that if you pick up this board, you do so from a reputable dealer who will take care of you.

Pros:

Great overclocking
Characteristically bold LanParty styling
Lots-o-extras
Plenty of onboard features

Cons:

Broken LAN!
Non-responsive Tech Support
Heatsink mounting holes may not work for all heatsinks

UPDATE: July 31, 2004

There is an update regarding DFI's tech support and the Onboard LAN problem on page two of this review.

/UPDATE

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Page 11 of 11

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Board Layout and Features
Page 3: Board Layout and Features, Continued
Page 4: Bundle and Extras
Page 5: BIOS
Page 6: Test Setup / Benchmarking
Page 7: Benchmarks: PCMark04 / Aquamark 03
Page 8: Benchmarks: Aida32 / Sandra 04
Page 9: Benchmarks: SpecViewPerf 7.1 / ScienceMark 2.0
Page 10: Benchmarks: Winbench 99 / UT2k3
Page 11: Overclocking / Conclusion

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17 User Comments

1 - Posted by MaNiAk21 on September 27, 2003 - 4:10 pm

Oooooooooo! The colors! The colors! Ermm... look awesome, though I would have liked to see mounting holes on such a high performance motherboard, especially when it is targeted at the enthusiast crowd... but as you said, a later revision may fix that minor problem. The 3D interactive movie was flawless if I might say so myself, I especially liked watching the stands numbers change. :D

2 - Posted by Brian on September 27, 2003 - 4:15 pm

Glad you liked it. Talking with DFI revealed a possible Revision B that will fix the mounting hole problems along with a few other things. Nothing for sure, though.

We are working to improve the quality of the 3D animations right now, hopefully we will have an easy solution that isn't too bandwidth intensive soon.

3 - Posted by A Person on September 27, 2003 - 5:32 pm

What would you use the dual ethernet for?

4 - Posted by handrail on September 27, 2003 - 7:59 pm

" If you want to mount a heatsink with screws, your screwed. That pretty much sums it up."

that your should be you're.

me wants DFI. if i had know it came with all that stuff, i would have gotten that over my a7n8x dlux, oh well se la vive.

la vive.

5 - Posted by handrail on September 27, 2003 - 8:00 pm

oh yeah, and the 3d rotat0r animations are the shizz boys. good on ya!

i dig 'em!

6 - Posted by m[X] on September 27, 2003 - 8:40 pm

Howcome you didnt include the cpu you used in test system section? ;)

7 - Posted by A Person on September 27, 2003 - 9:39 pm

It says on page 10. He was using an Athlon 1700+ and Corsair PC4000.

8 - Posted by ELiTE KiLLaH on September 27, 2003 - 10:11 pm

but it should have been in the specs (i too was looking for this..)

"made this board solid overclocker." (last pg)
maybe an an "a" in there?

i didnt proof read everything, just loooked at the results...lol..

9 - Posted by Brian on September 27, 2003 - 11:59 pm

Lol, I can always count on you guys when I don't have spellcheck installed :-D

All mistakes noted are fixed.

10 - Posted by handrail on September 30, 2003 - 3:16 pm

my wife is a word nerd, i can't get away with typos at home either.

11 - Posted by PHR34K3R on October 10, 2003 - 12:04 pm

I just got this board and I still havn't bought a heatsink for it. What heatsink would you suggest I use with this, The processor is an AMD Anthlon XP 2400+ 2.0GHz 266MHz.

12 - Posted by Brian on October 10, 2003 - 12:38 pm

I believe ThermalRight has released a socket mounting heatsink. You may want to look at that.

13 - Posted by Kurtis on October 10, 2003 - 1:31 pm

Aero 7+ would be a good choice as well. That's what I use and I haven't had any problems with it. If you haven't already, check out the review I did of it here to see what sort of cooling performance it has

14 - Posted by Guest on July 24, 2004 - 8:09 am

Interesting to read your comments about the SiL RAID controller as most users reckon the 3114 is noticeably slower than the 3112 & certainly not upto the Intel ICH5 (particularly as it passes data via the PCI Bus so it is possible to get bus saturation).

The DFI nForec2 boards have a lot of potential but they also have a no. of "issues"

15 - Posted by Guest on July 26, 2004 - 3:53 am

how does the board stand in comparison with the abit an7?

16 - Posted by dump_it_here on July 31, 2004 - 4:59 pm

I dont like the choice of Silicon Image for the SATA RAID in the B version of this board.

There have been a lot of reports of hard disk corruption corruption with Silicon Image.

The A version of this board uses a Highpoint RAID controller and Highpoint (in my opinion) is a far better RAID company then Silicon Image.

17 - Posted by Guest on January 20, 2005 - 3:21 pm

OMG thank you so much .. i have been trying for ages to get the mcp port working ... This must be the problem .. trying it right now.

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