Performance

In an era of AMD motherboards where performance is going to differ less than a couple of percent from platform to platform, all else being equal, the DFI LanParty SLI-DR motherboard shows great engineering by being able to come out on top of nearly all of our gaming benchmarks.  Quake III, UT2003, Doom 3 and Far Cry all showed performance gains on the DFI motherboard over the Gigabyte and Asus SLI motherboards.  Admittedly, these differences were very small, and in real world gaming you would probably not be able to tell three products apart.  If you thrive on having the absolute fastest possible system, bar none, then the DFI LanParty SLI-DR is going to be the best choice! 

In all other areas of our testing including real world applcations, 3D rendering and synthetic, the DFI motherboard held its ground and was able to post scores at or above both the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe and the Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI.  The DFI SLI-DR is no slouch when it comes to pushing the limits of your Athlon 64 processor.

Features

DFI has created another great motherboard package here including the extras thrown in the box and the features soldered on the motherboard.  The box includes your board, rounded cables, a front-case accessory box, wire sheathing, SATA power and data cables as well as various quick and full-length manuals for users with various technical backgrounds.  The PC transporter gives hardcore PC gamers a great bonus and the BIOS/jumper tool is great even if you decide to never use an SLI GPU setup.

On the board itself you'll find nearly everything you could want to start your new gaming system.  You have two Gigabit networking connections, 8-channel audio support, eight SATA connections and two IDE channels for all your storage needs.  There are six USB 2.0 connections on the back panel already with a Firewire port as well; users of various memory sticks and Ipods will be thankful for that! 

The NF4 SLI-DR BIOS is outstanding and feature rich for gamers and enthusiasts looking to overclock and tweak their system settings -- there are more options on this board than on any other NF4-based board I have yet seen. 

Add in SLI support and you have just about everything you could want for a brand new AMD-based motherboard.

Price

As we already know, the pricing of nForce4 SLI chipset motherboards is going to be higher than those based on the nForce4 Ultra chipset.  Currently, we are seeing the DFI nF4 Ultra board priced very competitvely at under $150.  Unfortunately, we only have a single seller shown on the DFI NF4 SLI-DR motherboard, and they have it priced over $200.  I would expect that price to drop to around $180 or below when other vendors begin to get their stock in. 

The news gets worse when you see that all the other SLI motherboards currently offered are priced less than the DFI LanParty board; price is usually one of DFI's strong points.  At this state, we are going to have to see the price on the board as a negative factor, but with high expectations that this price will fall very soon to at, or below the competing boards levels. 

SLI

Being that SLI is the main selling point of this board over their own NF4 Ultra motherboard, its important to note what you get with SLI technology -- increased gaming performance.  For a full look at what performance benefits SLI offers, please read our article on the subject, as it exceeds the space of this review. 

In my quick testing of the functionality of SLI mode on the DFI SLI-DR motherboard, I found the performance to be exactly as I expected and saw on the other SLI motherboards.  Just as you should see, games running at very high resolutions and quality settings do not show a big differentiation between motherboard platforms. 

Issues

There weren't any major issues that I came across while installing, using and testing the DFI LanParty NF4 SLI-DR motherboard.  Indeed there was much more positive to say about the motherboard than there was negative -- other than the jumper configuration being a bit of a hassle compared to the "flip-card" style used by Asus and Gigabyte.  And if you like the idea of a more stable switching option and you like the idea of another free toy, then maybe the jumpers will apeal to you.

Final Thoughts

DFI has created the first non-1st tier motherboard SLI solution.  Asus, Gigabyte and MSI were all hand held through the process of building their SLI motherboards, while DFI and its engineers were left to fend for themselves.  The result is a well made and well thought out motherboard with SLI as an extra bonus feature on top of that.  The amount of features, the great overclocking BIOS, an excellent physical layout and superb performance easily earned the DFI LanParty SLI-DR motherboard our Gold Award and puts it on the right track for our upcoming Editor's Choice selections!

Be sure to use our price checking engine to find the best prices on the new DFI SLI-DR, and anything else you may want to buy!