DFI NFII Ultra: Mean Green Dream Machine
by Wesley Fink on July 30, 2003 6:25 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Final Words
If you are looking for an AMD Athlon motherboard, the DFI NFII Ultra LanParty is without equal. For the gaming, case-modding, or LAN Party enthusiast, there is no Athlon motherboard that we have tested which comes close to the package provided by the DFI NFII Ultra LanParty. For those building with the popular side-window cases, the glow-under-black-light UV-reactive slots and cables make the NFII stand out from the competition. The multitude of cables and adapters that come stock with the NFII provide all the game, USB, firewire, sound, and front I/O ports any gamer could want.However, we found there was much more to the NFII than attention-grabbing eye-candy. The NFII is also the best-performing AMD Athlon board that we have tested. It overclocks further than any other Athlon board we have seen, and it performs better at all speeds in gaming benchmarks. The board was clearly designed and tweaked for gaming performance.
The available Performance BIOS we tested on this motherboard is icing on an already impressive cake. The very wide range of voltages and adjustments available will appeal to the computer enthusiast who will be excited at the ability to squeeze all the performance possible out of the nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset.
Even though the DFI is the best Athlon board that we have tested, it isn’t perfect. Those planning to use SATA hard drives will have to decide if the single on-board SATA connector, which disables Primary IDE, is a configuration they can live with. If it isn’t, then they would be forced to add a SATA IDE controller, or should look to other top-performing nForce2 boards, such as the Gigabyte 7NNXP. And while there are two LAN connections on the DFI NFII Ultra, neither provides a Gigabit LAN connection. If these faults are not very important to you, then this is the board to own. If you are looking for the best IDE RAID options available on any Athlon board, then it is hard to overlook this unique board with RAID 1.5, which allows both striping and mirroring with just two drives.
DFI has clearly succeeded in putting together a package that will excite many target groups. The NFII Ultra succeeds on many fronts, and will please many buyers. It's a unique board in a unique package with top-notch performance, and tweaking options to make any enthusiast drool. With all of the accessories and options in the package, at its current price, it is also a GREAT value.
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Jeff7181 - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
... and another thing.What the hell is with showing ONE benchmark results for the Gun Metal DX9 tests? What a complete waste of time those were!
Jeff7181 - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
I'm not impressed by this article. Comparing 4 motherboards huh? Don't strain yourselves over there guys.How bout throwing in a couple of the most popular motherboards for AMD rigs? Like the Asus A7N8X Deluxe and Epox 8RDA+
Seems like that would be the smart thing to do since people would be able to relate the performance a lot easier.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, July 30, 2003 - link
You are F-ing kidding me right>?!"Many benchmarks show widely different results with different video hardware, so we have indicated benchmarks run with the ATI Radeon 9800 PRO with an asterisk. Benchmarks without an asterisk were run with the nVidia Ti4600."
So you didn't use the same video card to compare both the NF2 Ultra boards? That is just bad form. Gee I wonder if the motherboard with the 9800 will be a little faster? DUh.
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, July 30, 2003 - link
We described the Raid 1.5 feature in this review, because many readers of our earlier DFI 875PRO review have asked questions about how this feature is supposed to work. We did not test the performance of Raid 1.5, so we did not comment on how it actually performs compared to other RAID configurations.Anonymous User - Wednesday, July 30, 2003 - link
Are you sure about RAID 1.5 too? I've seen several reports that it's nothing more than RAID 1(mirroring) with data being simultaniously read off both drives, which is in turn something a good RAID 1 controller should do anyhow, making RAID 1.5 marketing fluff.Wesley Fink - Wednesday, July 30, 2003 - link
Corrections are in process right now. When a review is written it is spell-checked, emailed, and then actually posted by a Managing Editor who is located thousands of miles from my location. The graphs are also created from formatted raw data at that point. Since I am new to Anandtech, then these kinds of errors do happen, and we take them very seriously.I sincerely apologize, but the errors will be corrected very soon. Since I am learning the Anandtech procedures, the fault is mine.