DFI LanParty NForce II Ultra Revision B - Articles / Reviews

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DFI LanParty NForce II Ultra Revision B

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Nicholas Hart
Kurtis
DFI
Jul. 23, 2004

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Board Layout and Features

I've had two LanParty boards in my lab and both drew a lot of attention. This is of course due the UV plastic connectors present on each. The NFII Ultra B connectors come in green and are plenty bright even without any UV light. The board uses a black PCB that looks good and gives contrast for the UV parts. The corners are rounded as well in case that's important to you.

The LanParty NFII Ultra Rev B uses the nVidia nForce 2 Ultra 400 northbridge supporting the latest Athlon XP processors and 400MHZ DDR memory in dual or single channel mode. The nVidia MCP-T southbridge is used to give 10/100 LAN, firewire connectivity and AC97 audio. New to the Rev B board is a passive heatsink on the southbridge. This is a welcome addition as even with the heatsink, it still gets hot to the touch.

There are onboard power and reset button which sure come in handy when running this system outside of a case. I like it when I don't have to fumble around the manual looking for the power and reset button pin-outs of the front panel connector.

Apparently 10/100 networking isn't up to snuff for a LanParty board so DFI used a Realtek controller to add a gigabit network controller in addition to the one supplied by the nForce chipset. In my testing, this turned out to be very fortunate as the nForce NIC simply would not work for me. Occasionally after an untolerably long wait I could DHCP an address but could not ping the default gateway let alone browse. I had the latest drivers from the website, I updated to the latest BIOS, I even tried disabling all devices to make sure there were no conflicts yet the NIC lay dead. In stark contrast to this, the RealTek controller worked without any hassle. I will follow up with DFI on this issue and post an update as I'm sure a flaw like this could not affect all the NFII Ultra boards on the market.

UPDATE: July 31, 2004

I eventually got in contact with DFI's tech support department. Unfortunately it was by directly e-mailing one of their techs which is not standard procedure (although they assure me that techsupport@dfiweb.com works). Their suggestion was to set the MAC address in the BIOS. That sounds strange, but is indeed an option under the "Genie BIOS' menu. There are two stickers on the AGP slot with the MAC addresses for both cards. Unfortunately they are not labeled, but if you load the RealTek driver and then run "ipconfig /all' you can see which one is assigned to it. That leaves the other MAC address for the nForce LAN. Once programmed, I was able to get an IP from DHCP and browse to my heart's content.

Now this all sounds great except for the little issue that most users will not ever think to do this. The stickers have 12 numbers on them and nothing else, there is no indication that they are the MAC addresses for the network controllers. The documentation that came with the board makes no mention that those are MAC addresses and when have you ever had to manually set the MAC address on a network controller to make it work? These are steps that no user should have to go through to make some of the most basic functionality of their motherboard work. I can only hope that noone else will have this problem; indeed, none of the other review sites mention it. But if you do, then maybe this information will help if, like me, you have trouble contacting DFI's tech support department.

/UPDATE

The AGP slot has moved toward the CPU socket in the Rev B version of the NFII Ultra. This relocation makes accommodation of double-width graphics cards much less troublesome as you will not lose a PCI slot in the process. However, if the fan on such a card is mounted too low, making use of the firewire headers will be more difficult. I used a BFG 5950 Ultra card to test just how close the fit might be and had to bend the firewire cable a bit more than I was comfortable with to get the card to seat properly.

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Page 2 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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