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DFI LanParty NForce II Ultra
BIOS
The Lan Party NForce II Ultra BIOS is based on the Phoenix/Award BIOS. The BIOS the board was shipped with was somewhat unstable. Flashing to the latest BIOS, which can be found on DFI's website, fixed any instability issues and made this board rock solid. The Advanced Chipset Features section of the BIOS gives you extensive control of the memory speeds and timings. There are so many options here, you may not even use most of them, but it is nice to have them.   Under the Power Management portion of the BIOS, you are given the options to Wake On Lan and Wake On Ring. You also have the options of booting your computer by pressing a key or mouse combination and the ability to prompt for a password.  The PC Health Status section displays the CPU and case temperature (taken from a thermal diode located under the CPU socket), the fan speeds and the voltages of the PSU lines. There is a feature to shutdown the computer if the CPU overheats, but the shutdown temperature is at an unmodifiable 110*C, where as the official maximum temperature for an Athlon is 95*C.  GENIE BIOS The Genie BIOS Settings section is by far the most interesting, containing access to many overclocking features and onboard device control. You are able to modify the CPU clock speed from 100 MHZ up to 300 MHZ (in one degree increments) and the multiplier from 5 to 22.     You are given a large amount of options for the CPU/RAM ratio: 2:1 5:3 3:2 4:3 5:4 6:5 1:1 and so on all the way to 1:2. You can lock the AGP speed at 50 or anywhere between 60 and 100 MHZ.  The CPU voltage can be set from 1.100 up to 2.000 in 0.025 increments. The AGP voltage can be set from 1.50 to 1.80. The chipset voltage can be set from 1.60 to 1.90. And finally, the DRAM voltage can be set from 2.50 to 2.80. I would have preferred a wider array of DRAM voltages, as some of the fastest memory modules require 2.9v.     The speed and voltage options in the GENIE BIOS are insane. Personally, I can't think of anything else I would like to see in a BIOS.
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
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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). Add Comment To add a comment without being a member, you may omit the password field, but you must enter your name (or nickname) along with your comment. * Denotes required fields. |
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