Board design

One of the cooler aspects of the LANPARTY NFII Ultra B’s board layout is the added space between the AGP and PCI slots. On your typical motherboard, these slots are usually separated by about half an inch. But on the LANPARTY NFII Ultra B, DFI provides over an inch of clearance between the two.

Plenty of room for the FX5950U

This is handy for GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and GeForce FX 5900 Ultra cards that consume two slots. It’s also great for those of you with Sapphire Ultimate Edition cards and those of you with Zalman heat pipes on your AGP graphics card because you can install your graphics card without taking up that first PCI slot like you normally would on many other motherboards. And for those of you with more conventional cards, it’s still good because you’ve got more clearance between your graphics card and the first PCI device in your computer.

Many DX9 graphics cards tend to get pretty hot, so this added bit of clearance ensures better airflow within your case. ASUS’ A7N8X-E Deluxe doesn’t have this feature, which again shows DFI’s commitment to providing a motherboard for the hardcore enthusiasts and gamers.

Fan headers here?

Passive cooling on the South Bridge

Plenty of space for the DIMMs

Both motherboards have enough clearance space between the DIMM sockets and AGP slot to install your memory and graphics card independent of each other. This is particularly impressive for the DFI motherboard due to the space between the AGP and PCI slots, which we just mentioned.

Of course, you can’t miss the sharp looks of DFI’s black PCB. The neon green PCI slots and DIMM sockets also look pretty good. Both boards use passive cooling on the Ultra 400’s North Bridge, this keeps temps in check without creating noise and it can be argued that active cooling solutions on North Bridge’s are more prone to fail. Obviously DFI and ASUS must both have data that supports this assertion, as they both use large heatsinks of similar designs.

If you look closely, you’ll also see a heatsink on the LANPARTY’s South Bridge. This is probably a little bit of overkill, as the MCP-T isn’t known for excessive heat ouput.

ASUS is a clean design

Plastic pad protects the motherboard from damage

Much better fan header location

Other than those differences, there really aren’t any gotchas with either board design. ASUS basically adapted the A7N8X Deluxe Rev 2.0 board design to the A7N8X-E, with the biggest change being the location of the CD headers, which had to be moved to the bottom of the motherboard to make room for the Marvell chip. DFI made some subtle changes to the LANPARTY NFII as well. We do prefer the fan header locations on the ASUS board. DFI places the secondary fan header and chassis fan header on the bottom of the board, beneath the last PCI slot, while ASUS places both of theirs towards the middle of the board, right above the AGP slot.

This makes the ASUS board more ideal for those of you with case fans right next to your motherboard’s backplate, behind the CPU, which is a popular location for exhaust fans in many cases. DFI’s fan headers are practically in the middle of nowhere in comparison.

Still, we give the board design edge to DFI, mainly because of their flawless execution of spacing between AGP, PCI, and DIMM sockets. And don’t forget DFI’s slick-looking black PCB.

No passive cooling here

Five PCI slots