Components (cont’d)

The motherboard

DFI nF4 Ultra-Infinity - $94 Newegg: While DFI has traditionally been a value motherboard player, in more recent years they’ve stepped up their efforts, targeting hardware enthusiasts and gamers with high-end motherboards, such as their highly popular LANPARTY series.

LANPARTY boards ship with all kinds of goodies – round IDE cables, frontx drive bay enclosures, and a bag for carrying your PC to LAN parties and other events, not to mention their other features, such as their CMOS Reloaded BIOS that is loaded with settings for tweaking, or their innovative board designs with features such as UV-sensitive slots and 100% Japanese capacitors. It’s because of all this that DFI has gained a significant amount of share from their competitors, such as ABIT and EpoX.

For consumers who like the LANPARTY brand and its features, but can’t quite afford their higher price tags, DFI offers their INFINITY series of motherboards. DFI recently re-launched their INFINITY brand starting with the NF4 SLI INFINITY and NF4 Ultra INFINITY. I couldn’t quite afford to upgrade to an nForce4 SLI board, so I chose the nForce4 Ultra-powered nF4 Ultra-Infinity for the $600 system build.

The nF4 Ultra-Infinity boasts a solid feature set in a no-frills package. This board is designed purely for performance. It supports GigE Ethernet networking and ships with support for up to four Serial ATA hard drives. Audio duties are performed by Realtek’s ALC655 six-channel audio CODEC, while the board also provides up to six USB ports and IEEE-1394.

For overclocking, DFI provides bus speeds up to 450MHz in 1MHz increments, while PCI-E clock adjustment up to 150MHz in 1MHz increments are also available. For voltages, DFI provides CPU voltage settings up to 1.85V (with the additional option of fixed or on the fly voltage adjustment) in increments of 0.025V up to 1.55V; from there increments increase to a larger 0.10V. Memory voltages range from 2.5V-3.2V in 0.10V increments.

In comparison to DFI’s highly popular LANPARTY UT nF4 Ultra motherboard, the INFINTY loses the more advanced 7.1-channel Realtek audio, as well as the second GigE Ethernet port, and of course you lose all the accessories that normally ship with LANPARTY board, but most enthusiasts probably already own their own high-end audio cards, and don’t need the second GigE Ethernet port anyway. Most overclockers will probably feel that the biggest deletion from the nF4 Ultra-Infinity board in comparison to its LANPARTY UT counterpart are some of the BIOS settings found in the LANPARTY’s CMOS Reloaded interface. Among value boards, the nF4 Ultra-Infinity is well equipped, but it doesn’t stack up in comparison to the LANPARTY UT, but of course, with its lower price tag ($24 less based on Newegg.com pricing) it’s not supposed to.