Hi -- this is DFI's latest and hopefully greatest board.
It's VERY new, and is still in the process of becoming available through retail sales.
In that respect it's similar to the ASUS A8N32, which is also the ASUS "latest and greatest"
model, is very new, and is still in the process of becoming readily available through retailers.
They're both NVIDIA chipset boards, and are essentially incremental improvements
over the other other dozens of Nvidia N-Force 4 (NF4) series of chipset based motherboards.
LANPARTY UT NF4 SLI-DR Expert
http://www.dfi.com.tw/Product/xx_produc..._ID=3872&CATEGORY_TYPE=LP%20UT&SITE=NA
The main differences that I know of are
a) the ASUS uses a substantially newer NVIDIA NF4 chipset, and it's a two-chip solution
rather than the 1-chip one used in essentially all other NVIDIA NF4 series motherboards.
The extra chip and capabilities added on the ASUS gives it the opportunity to have
two PCI EXPRESS true x16 slots running in X16 width mode simultaneously, so each
graphics card of a SLI pair of graphics cards would have the ultimate possible speed
and bandwidth in talking to the rest of the motherboard. In practice this in
itself is of only very questionable practical benefit because in almost all real world
cases, graphics cards just don't come close to needing as much speed and PCI-Express
handwidth as X16 offers, so really a X16 slot split into serving two cards (as ALL other
SLI motherboards now available do) is probably just fine.
b) the ASUS has an "8-phase" CPU power generation circuit. basically there are
eight voltage regulators that all share equally in the task of generating the approximately
90 watts of power an X2 4400 needs to run. During the peak demands of intense
computation and when overclocking, you CPU could be using well over 100 Watts of
power, and that is quite a lot. Most other motherboards divide the CPU power
generation task among either three or four voltage regulators, that end up being
on the verge of being overloaded with an X2 4400's power needs. The 3-phase
and 4-phase voltage regulation circuits common on most motherboards therefore
run at undesirably high temperatures, and they are not so capable as giving a
stable, clean, high capacity flow of power to your CPU as the ASUS's 8 phase
circuit seems to be. The ripples and "noise" in the CPU power from inadequate
3 or 4 phase voltage regulators may contribute to system crashes when overclocking
and under intense computational loads, especially if the airflow, heatsinking, cooling
of the power regulators and inside the case isn't extemly good.
c) The ASUS has its chipset and some of its CPU power regulators cooled by heatsinks
connected together with special copper "heat pipe" units. This brings the heat from
the chipset chips and transports it up the pipe to the heatsink near the rear of the
motherboard where it is better able to be cooled by airflow in the case. This
eliminates the noise, unreliability, bulkiness, and power requirements of having
heatsinks with their own little fans on the mothrboard chipset. The ASUS design
supposedly works well and can result in superior quietness and cooling for your
motherboard.
d) the way they arranged the amount and type of regular old style PCI slots and
other slots is different, so you may have preference for one or the other depending
on how many cards of what types you'll put into the PC. The main complaint about
the ASUS slots is that if you use two PCI Express graphics cards simultaneously
in SLI mode, it's a tight squeze to fit two or three regular PCI cards into the same
motherboard as the two PCIE SLI graphics cards. In some extreme configurations
with unusually large (ones purchased seperately and manually retrofitted onto the
graphics cards by the end user) graphics card heatsinks that take up two slots of
space as opposed to the standard one-slot-wide ones, you end up with only
a single free PCI slot, and that one can't have an unusually tall card in it since
it'll have to fit underneath the SLI bridge between the SLI PCIE gfx cards.
Anyway Anandtech reviews gave a VERY favorable review of the
ASUS for its quality, features, and overclocking performance.
http://anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2589
The ASUS board beat the DFI Expert board to market by about two weeks.
I was impressed by the 8-phase power supply and other quality features of the
ASUS board. ASUS is well reputed for makng stable, reliable, well performing
motherboards, and this one may be the best they've made yet if you're into
overclocking X2 or FX or similar CPUs.
DFI usually has several more highly technical and obscure BIOS settings for
minutely detailed timings of the RAM chips and things like that than other mothrboard
companies usually provide. This is handy for some extreme overclockers, but most
people can achieve a decent overclock on decent CPUs / RAM sticks without even
using 70% of the manual adjustment features the DFI BIOS supplies.
ASUS has a decent set of BIOS overclocking / timing / voltage / frequency control
options in the A8N32 BIOS. A much better set of options than the fairly decent ones
they've had on their past motherboards. I think that the vast majority of people will
never need much more than the timing / voltage / overclocking options the ASUS
provides, even if they're overclocking for practical purposes.
DFI's got a fairly sketchy reputation for "quirks", "bugs" and "finicky" weird problems
that creep into their BIOS software versions and to a lesser extent into the hardware
of their mothrboards. I think all companies have this to SOME extent, but it impresses
me that DFI has had it with some boards to such an extent that the only reasonable
conclusion that one can draw is that they've got incompetence and mismanagement
going on in their quality control, engineering, and BIOS / technical support departments.
Some people have had DFI motherboards that were virtually unusable for months
until DFI finally decided to come out with a working BIOS fix to some very simple
and serious problems with some of their motherboards. It's enough to make be
wary about trusting that I'm going to have an easy, fun, quick experience of getting
the most out of a new computer built with a new model of DFI motherboard.
Six months from now, I'm sure they'll have ironed out most of the bugs.. Until then,
well, I would be careful trusting the thing to work quite right.
In very extreme cases some people have even physically burned out RAM sticks
and CPUs and their DFI mothrboards because of badly designed motherboard features
that weren't working quite right either in the hardware or in the BIOS.
I put my money where my mouth is and bought the A8N32 ASUS board.
It was available 2-weeks sooner than the DFI, and all the features I feel I really
need, and I have more trust in the quality and reliability of it, especially it being
a new revision product, than I would with a DFI board.
I'd suggest you do the same. I think the DFI probably has a 4-phase CPU power
circuit which is probably borderline "ok", but for my $500 X2 I really thought the
extra quality of the ASUS board's 8-phase CPU power supply was useful and worthy.
I'm sure more reviews of the DFI Expert and A8N32 will be posted in the next two
weeks. I'm building my A8N32 X2 box tomorrow, and will post some results when
I finish.
It can be hard to find a store with EITHER the DFI or the ASUS board in stock now
since they're both new, but if you look around, I bet you can find the ASUS more
quickly and cheaply than the DFI...
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