| DFI Lanparty UT nF4 Ultra-D Motherboard - Page 3 of 7 |
Layout:
Besides being incredible to look at with the bright colors on a black background, the DFI Ultra-D is pretty well laid out. The two main power connectors are located clear out on the edge of the board; the primary and secondary IDE connectors are also located in a good position for clean cable management. The floppy connector is conveniently mounted 90 degrees off and just below the IDE. Clear up in the corner above the 24-pin power connector is a long jumper for extending the DIMM voltage all the way out to 4 volts. In the second picture below you can see the location of the third power connector, a Molex. Notice also the effort DFI put into cooling the Mosfets. Those are some serious heatsinks for such small chips. The Mosfet sinks are soldered with a bracket to the back of the board.
 
Down below, we have the CMOS backup battery in a traditional location along with the red jumper for clearing CMOS. The four NVIDIA SATA ports can be seen in the top of the picture along with the vacant area where the SIL 3114 SATA controller and its four SATA ports would be mounted.
A few standout features can be seen in the picture on the left. All Lanparty boards include onboard power and reset switches; these are incredibly convenient for those testing new configurations, as you don’t have to worry about unnecessary gear like a case. The blue jumper (JP1) just to the right of the reset switch is also nice; it allows you to return to stock processor settings without clearing the entire CMOS. The last thing to note is header connectors for 4 USB ports. The picture on the right shows 2 PCI ports along with a selection of PCI Express ports. You can also see the grouping of PCI Express configuration jumpers. These jumpers allow you to dictate how much of the PCI Express bus each of the available ports gets. Although the Ultra-D does not support SLI, it does support Dual PCI Express video cards with each port having an 8x connection instead of the normal 16x for a single port. Also noteworthy is the diagnostic LEDs DFI has included. There are four LEDs located in the lower left corner, the LED’s all light up when boot is initiated, as each part of the boot is completed successfully, another LED goes out. When all four extinguish, the system has been turned over to the operating system. Note the missing header above the word DEBUG, this is present on the SLI-DR board for the same group of LED’s that are present on the FrontX device.
 
Just to the North of the group of PCI Express slots and a bit South of the CPU socket is the fourth power connector, a 4-pin floppy style connector. DFI recommends using all four power connectors when running dual video cards. Out back you have standard PS2 ports for keyboard and mouse, coaxial input and output connectors, a big gap for the Karajan sound module, 6 USB 2.0 ports, a firewire port, and dual Gigalan ports. One of the Gigalan ports is controlled by a Vitesse VSC8201 chip; the other by an onboard Marvel solution. You can also see DFI chose to mount the 4 DIMM memory slots above the CPU, this is not typical and is more like the soon to be BTX standard. This design allows the memory to receive better cooling. DFI chose to use only the best capacitors; these capacitors are manufactured in Japan by Chemi-Con.
 
The CPU lives in the center of the board. This placement allows for almost any kind of cooling available and very few clearance issues will come about. Even the humongous Thermalright XP120 fit without much issue.
 
There may be some clearance issues with very tall memory and the XP120. It was not difficult to install the memory after the heatsink was installed, but if you have taller memory with heat spreaders, it may be almost impossible. Other heatsinks do not have the big overhang issue the XP120 does, so clearance will not be a problem.
 
The chipset cooler is another unique thing DFI included. For years people have been complaining to DFI about the lack of active cooling for the chipsets on their motherboards. DFI listened and included not only active cooling, but also the best fan possible. Most small chipset sized fans create tons of noise. DFI decided to go a little different route on the nF4 boards. They included a magnetic floating fan manufactured by Sunon called the Maglev. This fan literally floats on a magnetic field so noise is reduced greatly.
One issue with the chipset is the placement right underneath the tail of the primary video card PCI Express slot. When a video card is installed in PCI Express slot 1, there is barely any clearance between the fan and the video card. I have read many things stating that some cards interfere with the fan when it is spinning, however I had almost an 1/8” of clearance. It appears this might be a limitation most nF4 based boards share, since it is nVidia's reference design and not something DFI has done on their own. Adding taller sinks or bigger fans to the chipset is not going to happen. The cooler is attached by plastic press pins and is easily removed. I removed the cooler and applied Arctic Silver 5 to make for better heat transfer.
 
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