The transition between AGP and PCIe has also brought out a crop of new chipsets from everybody including NVIDIA's nForce 4 platform which brings arguably the richest feature set out of the current generation of K8 boards. The current chipsets that have recently hit the market are also of much interest to consumers as it finally brings PCIe and socket 939 into one package both of which are seen as longer term technologies compared to socket 754 and AGP, something that a lot of enthusiasts have been holding out for. While there is never really any shortage of motherboard manufacturers, the same cannot be said about enthusiast level boards. While most manufacturers do realize that overclocking is not merely just a fringe hobbyist activity, and do include some tweaking options, there are few that go all out and really let loose the options in the BIOS to allow the end user to really break something. One of the fast rising stars in the enthusiast department is DFI. After setting their mark with their LanParty nForce 2 Ultra board, as the enthusiast board to get for the Socket A platform, DFI has further extended their LanParty lineup to both the Socket 754 and Socket-T line ups all of which have been well received.
Today we take a look at one of DFI's entries into the Socket 939 and PCIe market in the LanParty UT nF4 Ultra-D. DFI combines the rich feature set of the nForce 4 Ultra chipset with their rich overclocking palette along with a few extras like the additional x16 PCIe slot. DFI looks like they may have the combination for success and we'll take a closer look at the nF4 Ultra-D right now.
DFI nForce4: SLI and Ultra for Mad Overclockers (2005-02-08)