DFI LanParty NForce II Ultra Revision B

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Nicholas Hart
Kurtis
DFI
Jul. 23, 2004

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Bundle and Extras

Every LanParty board comes in a brightly colored, oversized box with a carrying handle. This is of course because DFI packs plenty of goods to accompany the board and they need room to pack it all in. Opening the box reveals a host of smaller boxes; its kind of like those sampler food baskets you get for Christmas only you won't be feeding any of this to your dog.

My favorite goodie of the bunch is the rounded cables. Covered in a translucent rubber sleeve that matches the color of the board components, these cables not only perform well and promote good airflow but look nice as well. You get one IDE and one floppy cable and each has plastic tabs to make removal easy.

Also high on my list is the FrontX device that accompanies the NFII Ultra B. While it may not have the bold colors of the other components, it is a very high quality device. It comes ready for business with expansion ports for the LED diagnostic lights, dual USB, firewire, audio out and mic in. The beauty of the FrontX device is that you can order additional ports for any added functionality that you want.

The LanParty NFII Ultra B also comes with a PC Transpo carrying strap for easing the chore of hauling your system around. This is a very sturdy strap system with a mesh bag attached for holding some of your smaller accessories. All the straps and connectors are beefy to hold all but the heaviest of systems.

The Accessory Kit box contains the other useful cables and tidbits such as two SATA cables, a molex 4-pin to dual SATA power adapter, the rear panel I/O shield, two firewire ports mounted on a PCI bracket and some silicone heat sink paste.

Packed with the motherboard are the driver CD, F6 floppy for the SATA RAID controller and a CD containing InterVideo WinDVD and WinRIP software.. There is a case badge, a small bag of extra jumpers and a, for lack of a better term, bumper sticker as well. Aside from the drivers, the driver CD also contains DFI's LiveUpdate software consisting of the RadarSync and WinFlash utilities. RadarSync notifies you of driver updates and WinFlash is used to automatically update your system to the latest BIOS available from the DFI website. The "automatic' part of the software scares me, but I sure prefer flashing the BIOS from windows over making a boot floppy. The WinDVD and WinRip software will come in handy if you don't already have similar software installed but it doesn't make me all tingly nearly as much as the other items.

Finally we get to the documentation that comes with the LanParty NFII Ultra B. A Quick Installation Guide has plenty of nice full-color pictures with some basic instructions for getting all your hardware installed. The Features booklet gives a cursory overview of the bundled software except for the SiliconImage RAID software for which there are 30+ pages of information. It seems as though DFI simply copied a SiliconImage booklet directly into their own. It's actually nice to have this level of detail in a manual, too bad DFI doesn't go into such detail regarding their own software. The User's Manual does an excellent job of covering the board layout and all the pin-out information for the onboard headers and connectors. Unfortunately, like the other software, little attention is given to the BIOS with only the CMOS Reloaded feature being mentioned. But you're already an expert and can build a system blindfolded, arms tied behind your back and holding the screwdriver with your toes right? You don't need no stinking manuals.

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Page 4 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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