DFI LanParty NForce II Ultra

Reviews: Hardware

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Brian Kristensen
Kurtis
DFI
Sep. 27, 2003

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Layout & Features

The first thing you will notice about this board is the neon green against the black PCB. Many of the plastic components (The AGP, PCI, DIMM, and IDE slots) on the board are UV reactive and will glow a bright green when placed under Ultra Violet light. This is a feature specific to DFI's Lan Party series, which we first saw in our Lan Party KT400a review.

The first thing that caught my attention (even though it isn't very noticeable at first glance) is the lack of mounting holes around the socket. When you pick out a heatsink for this board, you better make sure it can utilize the socket mounting mechanism rather than mounting with screws. Future revisions of this board may solve this problem.

The North bridge features a large passive heatsink just like on the KT400a. The NForce 2 Ultra chipset generates less heat than the older NForce 2 and doesn't require any active cooling (although the older Nforce 2 didn't require active cooling either).

The NForce II Ultra board supports dual channel memory, and provides three memory slots and a maximum of 3 GB of DDR memory. The board supports up to PC3200 (DDR400). The first channel has two slots while the second channel has one.

There is a clip on the end of the AGP 8x slot which will hold the AGP card in place. This is the same mechanism that was seen on the KT400a. The clip works well, but I would prefer a sliding lock similar to the one on the Soyo Dragon 2.

There are four IDE connectors on this board. The IDE connectors are at the edge of the board and out of the way. Two of the IDE slots are for RAID operation which supports RAID 0, 1, 0+1, and DFI's very own RAID 1.5.. There is also a single SATA connection which takes the place of primary master. You can enable and disable SATA in the BIOS.

The Lan Party NF2U board supports RAID in 0 (striping), 1 (mirroring), 0+1, (striping + mirroring) and 1.5 (huh?!) using the HPT372N controller from HighPoint. RAID 1.5 is a unique RAID setup developed by DFI. RAID 1.5 combines striping and mirroring like RAID 0+1, but with only two hard drives! With RAID 1.5, half of the data is stored on one half of the first drive, while the other half is stored on one half of the second drive. The remaining space on each drive is used for mirroring the data stored on the other drive accordingly. This will give you the benefits of backing up your data while increasing the speed without having to spend the extra cash on two more hard drives.

Right above the IDE connections are two buttons. These are power and reset buttons that DFI has included on the board. This is a great feature for those of you who like to work on your computer outside of your case. I know I use it on many occasions and wish more boards had this option. A speaker is directly mounted on the board, which is again helpful if you are testing the board outside of a case.

The I/O ports on the NForce II Ultra are exactly the same as the KT400a board. There are the usual PS/2 ports along with the parallel and serial ports. There are two Ethernet 10/100 ports for the Dual LAN feature of this board. Below each Ethernet port are two USB 2.0 ports which make for a total of four USB ports. There are also three audio jacks for the onboard AC'97 sound (although I would have preferred NVidia's SoundStorm). The onboard sound supports 6 channels and DirectSound/ DirectSound 3D.

There are small red LEDs located in a few places around the motherboard. These LEDs switch to different combinations according to the settings of the motherboard and they help you detect if there is an error while booting.

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Layout & Features
Page 3: Extras
Page 4: BIOS & GENIE BIOS
Page 5: Test System & Sandra CPU Benchmarks
Page 6: Sandra & Aida32 Memory Benchmarks
Page 7: ScienceMark & PCMark02 Benchmarks
Page 8: 3DMark01 & 3DMark02 & GLMark Benchmarks
Page 9: Overclocking & Conclusion

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1 User Comment

1 - Posted by Guest on August 2, 2004 - 8:17 am

Minor mistake in the review, otherwise good work : this board actually DOES feature Nvidia SoundStorm! Written on the back of the box in fairly big letters (doh) plus deatiled on the DFI spec page.

If you want 5.1 audio out then you must scarifice the mic-in and line-in ports since the IO plate only has 3 audio jacks. However, a rear backplate bracket is available direct from DFI to add extra audio jacks which will prevent the loss of those ports (but it's NOT included by default in the box, which would have been better to see).

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