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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DFI opted to update the RAID controller with the Rev B version of the NFII Ultra and removed the HighPoint IDE controller in favor of a Silicon Image "SATALink' SATA RAID controller. This controller is easy to setup and performs amazingly well. In fact, if you compare the WinBench99 hard disk scores from this review to one of the 875 board reviews I wrote earlier, you will notice that the SATALink controller in RAID-0 mode scores much higher than the 875 boards with Intel RAID using the same WD Raptor drives!

There are three of the IEEE1394 "firewire' headers that I mentioned earlier on the board supporting 400MB/s transfers. I'm slightly disappointed by the lack of a firewire port on the back-panel but there is a slot bracket included with two ports and the Front-X panel has a port as well so I can't complain too much. And since firewire devices can be daisy chained similar to external SCSI devices, there really isn't a need for a large amount of ports.

A single USB header on the board adds two to the total of six USB 2.0 ports that are on the NFII Ultra Rev B; the others of course residing on the back-panel.

Speaking of back-panels, a minor change was made in moving to Rev B. Where the second COM port was located, there are now SPDIF audio out connectors. This is a welcome feature as the option for a quality output source for a high-end speaker setup is probably more useful to most people than a secondary COM port. There are also connections for 6 channel audio using standard 1/8" jacks, a parallel port and of course the PS/2 keyboard/mouse connections in addition to the previously mentioned four USB and dual network ports.

This bios chip is not normally something worth mentioning but the one included on the LanParty NFII Ultra B is socketed as opposed to soldered on to the board. While not generally of importance, if you happen to be so lucky as to witness a BIOS upgrade gone awry you can take heart that you will not need to send the entire board back in but can merely request a new chip.

The NFII Ultra Rev A lacked CPU heatsink mounting holes which was a sore spot for us in that review. However, the Rev B does have them. Don't jump for joy yet though as there is a flaw in the design; there are SMT components mounted so close to one of the holes it cannot be used by some heatsinks. I have a Zalman CNPS-7000AlCu heatsink for my P4 system and I used the included Socket A mounting hardware to test fit. If I were to actually tighten the bracket down it would crush the tiny components around the mounting hole. I fail to understand why DFI would decide to bother to reconfigure part of the board to add mounting holes only to place components so close that it isn't compatable with all heatsinks.

Last but not least, there are no less than five red LEDs on the board, one to indicate standby power and four to provide to diagnostic information. There is also a header to mirror the diagnostic LED output to a connector for the Front-X device. I'm used to only seeing red when there is a problem but that would mean there are four extremely bright LEDs on the board not doing anything so DFI decided that they will be lit when all is happy with the system. I suppose they figure that with such bright plastic components, who wouldn't want other bright things to look at? I can't say I disagree.

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Page 3 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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