DFI nForce4: SLI and Ultra for Mad Overclockers
by Wesley Fink on February 5, 2005 9:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
General Performance & Encoding
The DFI nForce4 is competitive with other Athlon 64 boards in Business and Multi-Media Winstones, but it is hardly a standout performer as it is in gaming benchmarks. The DFI does, however, perform exceptionally well compared to the nForce4 Reference and other Athlon 64 boards in PCMark 2004 and the 2-pass Auto GK Media Encoding benchmark. It is clear that DFI is continuing to tweak stock performance as the stock scores in these benchmarks are much improved over results that we have seen from DFI in the past.
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mob58 - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
I sprang for the Ultra-D following Anandtechs Review expecting great things. Unfortunately my experiences with this board have been miserable. I'm going to try to RMA it. I've built about a dozen systems and have never had so many problems. I suppose I just got a bad board, but this has soured my opinion of DFI a bit. Any recommendations for an altenate?Quanticles - Tuesday, February 22, 2005 - link
There isnt any talk of a standardized SLI format, is there?oldbutdumb - Thursday, February 17, 2005 - link
I won't get into the DFI trap again. I worked real hard to get the first Lan Party NFII A to work then rma'd it and got the NFII B Ultra. Same story. Too many issues of incompatibilities between bios versions and other hardware used with the boards. I don't know if it's DFI's fault or Nvideas but either way your left with a defective systemWesley Fink - Wednesday, February 16, 2005 - link
#110 - Any 2-slot bridge will work on the DFI. The DFI, Gigabyte, and MSI are all 2-slot bridge designs and interchangable. The Asus A8N-SLI is a 3-slot design, and is longer than the other bridges.ALL - As of this date of 2/16 all of the DFI Ultra-D boards in the market are still moddable to SLI. No one has received shipments yet of the new revised nF4 Ultra chipset that can not be modded, but they are expecting the first shipments soon.
mikerand - Sunday, February 13, 2005 - link
the comment on the review says:"DFI has advised us, and posted on their website, that they will NOT sell the SLI bridge to buyers of the Ultra board"
does this mean if you buy an ultra board and mod it that without this bridge you wont be able to run it in sli mode?
is dfi the only place you can get this bridge from?
PrinceGaz - Saturday, February 12, 2005 - link
Thanks Wesley.Wesley Fink - Friday, February 11, 2005 - link
#106 - YES, the Sil3114 supports SATA drive mode in addition to various flavors of RAID. Yes, the BIOS does have a CAS 1.5 option.Teleri mm - Friday, February 11, 2005 - link
Anyone know for sure if the boards at Newegg are still modable?http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?desc...
Teleri
PrinceGaz - Friday, February 11, 2005 - link
Another question (shame you didn't answer my previous ones about overclocking and SATA drives, and whether drive(s) connected to the SiI 3114 controller can be used in non-RAID mode).Does the BIOS give the option of a CAS 1.5 setting?
amgreenwalt - Wednesday, February 9, 2005 - link
I would like to see a comparison between Asus,Abit,MSI & DFI. My only concern with DFI is the layout. I have a Koolance Case and I like to minimize the amout of cables in the open. Not too sure how that would work in this situation. Is there anyone who has this board with a koolance setup?