The Motherboard

If there’s one company that AMD owes a favor to, it’s NVIDIA. Although AMD chipsets have been reasonably well designed, and VIA, SiS, and ALi chipsets were critical in establishing the original AMD Athlon K7 platform as the first non-Intel pin compatible platform from AMD, it’s NVIDIA who has made them superstars with a motherboard platform incorporating flagship performance, features, and the collective knowledge of NVIDIA’s driver team.

When it comes to motherboard chipsets, we can think of no other platform we’d prefer over NVIDIA nForce 4 and nForce Professional – even the famed Intel platform division that produced the legendary Triton 430TX, 440BX, and i875P loses in a matchup against “nForce4 SLI for Intel.” The Intel team still has some SATA RAID talent that NVIDIA does not, but I wouldn’t be surprised if NVIDIA’s team ends up recruiting Intel platform engineers too.

Which nForce4 SLI motherboard?

We’ve already done a round-up of most of the nForce4 SLI motherboards on the market. In that article, we gave the DFI LANPARTY nF4 SLI-DR our Editor’s Choice Award and the MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum our Bull’s Eye Award.

Both products clearly would be potential candidates for our ultimate desktop system. The DFI is faster on the benchmarks, however the MSI has more SATA-II ports with the second Silicon Image controller running on PCI-Express, a second GigE controller running on the PCI-e bus also, and an integrated SB Live 24-bit. In fact, the MSI would clearly have been a good candidate for our storage server and given the Tyan Tomcat K8E a run for its money (last year, we used a Tyan Trinity i875P for our storage server) and probably be my choice for a single processor Athlon64 SLI capable motherboard where I knew I’d need the SATA-II support.

That said, for gaming, the extra features of the MSI aren’t that useful and when it comes to raw performance the DFI is our easy top pick. It had the consistent performance advantage over the competition in our nForce4 round-up, and comprehensive overclocking features. Likewise, the LANPARTY nF4 SLI-DR also had the nicest set of “extras” such as the FrontX drive bay, high-quality round cables and UV sensitive cable wraps, as well as a harness for transporting your system.

Japanese Capacitors

The specification list for the DFI motherboard includes a bullet point that Japanese capacitors are used. This is a feature worth discussing – since it’s not designed to suggest that Japanese-made products are better than Taiwanese-made products as some people might assume.

The story behind this is industrial espionage and therefore many of the details are sketchy. The story begins with the recruitment of a Japanese scientist who had previously worked at one of the major Japanese capacitor firms. He had been recruited by a Taiwanese capacitor firm to replicate the electrolyte that had been available in Japan. This scientist was able to successfully replicate the electrolyte, but after the problem was solved, his research staff went rogue and they took the formula and began to sell their own electrolyte at bargain pricing to other Taiwanese companies. Unfortunately, they stole the wrong formula and the result was that several Taiwanese capacitor companies faced the daunting prospect that they had shipped millions of bad capacitors that could fail early.

Of course, now that the problem is known, most capacitor manufacturers are avoiding any shady electrolytes and many manufacturers in Taiwan will important the electrolyte from Japan to guarantee the reliability of their products for their customers. So, while it’s great to see that the capacitors are sourced from Japan, it doesn’t mean that non-Japanese capacitors are necessarily any worse.

Going rogue is usually more fun, but I guess in this case it wasn’t. ;)

DFI LanParty nF4 SLI-DR
$200
http://www.dfi.com.tw

Running Total: $1200