Some of the most famous Abit motherboards from the past were designed by Oskar Wu, who became an engineering legend in the overclocking community with his brilliant overclocking designs. When Oskar moved to DFI last year, it did not surprise industry insiders to see DFI emerge as a new performance and overclocking board maker. DFI already was well known as an OEM manufacturer that built solid and dependable boards for others. But this new emphasis on overclocking and top performance from DFI came as a surprise to those who did not know some of the key people DFI acquired from Abit and Soyo. In the past year, DFI has built a solid reputation with the LANParty series designed for overclockers and gamers. Anyone looking for top performance and the best overclocking capabilities quickly learned to include DFI on their short shopping list.

It is in this climate that the enthusiast community has been eagerly awaiting Oskar Wu's latest design for the Athlon 64. Prototypes and samples have been out for several weeks, and the leaked results from early testing have created huge excitement. Enthusiasts who follow scores at Future Mark noticed that the new performance leader for 3DMark2001SE was suddenly a new DFI nForce3 250Gb board based on socket 754, and not the newest socket 939 Dual-Channel designs. What was this new board, and when would we see shipping boards?

That new board is the DFI LANParty UT nF3 250Gb, and DFI was gracious to provide an exclusive to AnandTech for the first production DFI nF3 250Gb. Boards are expected to begin shipments to the US this week.

Basic Features: DFI LANParty UT nF3 250Gb
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  • leexgx - Thursday, November 4, 2004 - link

    the 939 AMD cpu will only be my upgrade path (unless i wait and some thing els comes out)

    my NF7-S v2.0 mobo has 2x faster mem speed then an s754 so in my view it be an Downgrade if i whent to it

    my upgrade (dream at the mo :)
    MSI K8N Neo2 (waiting for the nForce4 ultra to comes out) or something like it (but nf4 chip)
    3500+ 939 (mite even wait for the 4000+ or the FX55 to come down in price)
    2x 512 ddr 400 OCZ low latency stuff (or other stuff that mite run better then OCZ)
  • MiLaMber - Sunday, October 31, 2004 - link

    Hmm
    Why on earth bring out this board for s754 NOW??
    Do they honestly think ppl would have waited this long for s754? They SHOULD have made it s939.

    I see this as lost revenue for DFI.

    Fantastic board yes, but for those who are looking to currently upgrade, will there be many who opt for this baord over a s939?

    I wish they had brought it out as a s939, as I would forget about buying an MSI K8N Neo2 in an instant.
    Its all well and good having the best board, but you need to have some savvy to, and think about when the introduction of your board will result in the greatest revenue!
    And thats just plain common sense.
  • tchuyev - Monday, October 25, 2004 - link

    So... using 3 SATA disks in a RAID0 array (using SATA ports 2 & 3 + 1 or 2, along with 2 * 512 OCZ PC-4200), I can't overclock the motherboard any higher than 240 FSB, right ?

    Using both the nForce & Marvell SATA controlers with the same 3 SATA disks on a RAID0 array : is it more likely to cause a performance drop - comparing to 2 disks on ports 3 & 4 - more than anything else ?

    In my case, wouldn't it be thus better to go for a Silicon Image 3114r instead, like on the Asus K8N-E Deluxe ?

    Thanx a bunch ;)

  • GGiovanni - Saturday, October 9, 2004 - link

    Is there any detail regarding the memory DDR616 bandwidth since this mb uses on single channel setup? I'm interested on bandwidth when oc , not only low CAS o other tweaks.
  • Happy Buddha - Tuesday, September 21, 2004 - link

    Opps! Looks like I have double personality and they bot want to know what RAM have you bought.
    =:p
  • Happy Buddha - Tuesday, September 21, 2004 - link

    #47 - What RAM stick are you using?!? I have never seen a review on the Net that was able to pull these timing @245mhz Fsb..
  • Happy Buddha - Tuesday, September 21, 2004 - link

    #47 - What RAM Stick are you using? I have never seen any review out there that have been able to push these timing at 245Mhz FSB...
  • eva2000 - Monday, September 20, 2004 - link

    awesome review.. just got my DFI Lanparty UT NF3-250Gb 3 days ago and posted results at http://i4memory.com/showthread.php?t=142 with my AMD64 3400+ @ 11x 245HTT = 2695mhz and ram at 245mhz 2-2-2-6 1T !

  • JustAnAverageGuy - Sunday, September 12, 2004 - link

    "With our stock 3200+ and ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, the DFI is one of the better 2nd generation 754 boards. Standard performance tests demonstrate the DFI LANParty UT is very competitive with other recent Athlon 64 boards in Direct X 9 games, which is all we would expect. UT2004 and Far Cry include results from Socket 939 and Intel 775 for comparison. Since both the 939 and 775 results were with faster CPUs running an nVidia 6800 Ultra AGP 8X/PCIe, it is remarkable that the scores are as close as they are."

    I nearly missed that paragraph. Perhaps you should make it stand out a little better?
  • Cygni - Thursday, September 9, 2004 - link

    If it does come in around that price point, DFI will move ALOT of these things...

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