DFI nF4 Ultra-Infinity any good?

[kitchenshark]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813136163

I'm looking for a decent board with a decent level of BIOS features and especially looking for a DFI board. Any thoughts about this one?

Any suggestions for other boards/manufacturers are welcome with two exceptions:

1. PLEASE DO *NOT* SUGGEST ANY ASUS BOARDS!

I have owned 3 of them in my lifetime and none of them have lived up to their reputation. Others seem to have great success with Asus, I have not and don't care to try again. Nothing personal to anyone, just my preference.

2. SLI is not needed.

Thank you for your time.

 

[kitchenshark]

Ah! Thank you wusy! That's precisely the info I was looking for.

I greatly appreciate your input.

 

[Banusflakes]

It's basically a lanparty board based on the N4-Ultra Chipset rather than the NF4-SLi chipset. I've been looking at this board too for my next build which will be an Opteron 165 + DFI for OC purposes. It seems like a fast, stable and flexible board that gives you everything you want in terms of bios tweaks and other hallmarks of DFI lanparty boards without the added price tag of SLi.

Are there any quantitative differences between the NF4 Ultra and the NF4-Sli other than the obvious (one has SLi and the other doesn't)?

I don't really see SLI as being necessary either, since I'll be gaming on a monitor with a native resolution of 1280x1024. Plus, it seems like the multi-GPU solutions in the future will be on a single card given how much more economical that is. Of course being a serious gamer and general computer performance enthusiast I want as many other features as possible (SATA3.0gb/s, RAID, OC-friendly Bios etc). From what I've seen this is the best board to meet these requirements.

 

[kitchenshark]

I would agree with you. And as far as I can see too it's only missing the SLI option. I was indeed hoping that it would have similar levels of OC features and BIOS options of the LANparty.

I think this will be the basis of my next build. Juuuust as soon as I can get some money together. Because I'd need to purchase a PCI-e video card too. >.< Having a 6600GT I don't want to go any lower, and there's no point in buying another 6600GT in PCI-e. Got my eye on the 7600GT though.

 

[Banusflakes]

according to the DFI specs, the board has the exact same Bios interface and OC tools as the SLi Lanparty boards.

As far as video cards go, if you're going to go for a single card, you might as well save the extra $ and get something better than the 7600GT. I'm definitely not going to settle for anything less than an 1800XT but will probably wait a little longer and save the extra $100 to get the 1900XT. The ATI cards have a serious advantage when it comes to HDR enabled stuff and I'd be willing to bet that the next generation of games will be relying on that more and more. On the other hand, NVIDIA always seems to have better drivers than ATI. I HATE the damn Catayst Control Center and the multiple instances of CLI.exe that run in the background on my comp! I want some quality graphics for a change (my x700 pro doesn't cut the mustard) and I definitely don't want to have to buy a new card for another year at least.

 

[kitchenshark]

I've thought about getting a better card than the 7600GT, but, seeing my financial situation and that I'm a moderate to medium gamer it seems the best choice for me at the moment. In actuality I'm perfectly happy with a 6600GT and if it weren't the fact that i'd be paying 1/2 to 3/4 of the price of a 7600GT by buying a 6600GT PCI-e, I'd stick with the 6600GT.

@ wusy

Cool Just so long as it has more BIOS features and tweaks than a MSI NEO-FIR2 board XD I do like my current MSI (has served md faithfully ever since it first came out) but it needs more BIOS tweaks. Upgrade to PCI-e would be nice too, take the plunge so to speak.