42 MA XIMUMPC MAY 2005
MOTHERBOARDS:A-ZnVidia’s reference design, but its delicate retaining arm feels just a little
under-engineered (at least it wasn’t as annoying as DFI’s design, below).
Overall, we’re pleased with the board’s use of PCI-E, and the novel
use of an audio DSP, but we wish MSI had gone all the way. Still, for just
three more Jeffersons than you’d pay for either of the lesser Ultras we
looked at, you get a whole lot more mobo.DFI LAN PARTY NF4-SLI DR
Who says motherboards are all the same? You certainly can’t say that
about DFI’s LAN Party NF4-SLI DR, which takes a unique tack among SLI
boards. The most noticeable departure are the six jumper blocks that must
be plucked out to reconfigure the board for SLI mode.
We thought DFI was just trying to piss us off, at first, but this design
is actually good for some applications. First, it allows you to configure the
PCI-E slots in a more flexible manner (see this month’s In The Lab section
on page 66 for details). Second, the contact is more permanent than with
the typical SLI configuration cards, which seem at risk of popping out.
DFI’s engineers have also carried the audio daughtercard idea—which
we first saw in Abit’s Fatal1ty AA8XE motherboard (reviewed April 2005)—
to its logical conclusion: Abit moved the audio jacks onto a daughtercard
to eliminate electrical noise, but left the actual audio codec on the board.MSI K8N NEO4 PLATINUM/SLI
If you thought we were harsh for yawning at the Ultra boards’ lack of features,
you won’t when you hear about the SLI motherboards.
MSI’s K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI ladles on goodies that just don’t come
with budget boards, and it even features a couple new tricks we hadn’t
seen before. First up is the inclusion of a Creative Sound Blaster Live!
DSP, coupled with a 24-bit Cirrus Logic codec. Unlike other mother-
boards, the K8N Neo4’s Live! handles some audio-processing chores to
lighten the CPU’s load. The new 24-bit Live! supports EAX Advanced HD,
but it’s not clear what level of support it offers.
The second new feature the K8N Neo4 offers is a Silicon Image
RAID controller that plumbs into PCI Express. Consumer boards typi-
cally feature RAID chips that plug into PCI, which limits throughput to
133MB/s. Even though it’s only on an x1 PCI-E connection, the K8N’s
RAID wouldn’t be bottlenecked until it hit 250MB/s. Even better, the Sil
3132 supports SATA 3Gb, as well as both NCQ and TCQ modes.
Although these features are revolutionary, MSI didn’t go all the
way. The board has two NICs, but instead of offering dual Gigabit, they
comprise a Fast Ethernet/Gigabit combo. MSI also skimped on the PCI-E
slots. Who knows if we’ll have PCI-E cards (other than graphics cards,
of course) this year, but if you run SLI in the K8N board, you’ll have used
all your PCI-E options.
Performance-wise, the K8N is just what we’d expect from an MSI
board: pretty durn good. We saw a drop in performance in SLI mode
when running PC Mark 2004’s graphics bench (which we don’t take too
seriously), but SLI performed as expected elsewhere.
One thing we don’t dig is the SLI configuration card. MSI usesDFI packages both the analog outputs and a Realtek codec onto the sepa-
rate card. Theoretically, this design should make the onboard audio sound
cleaner, and it would be even better if DFI had used 24-bit—instead of
16-bit—codecs. That design choice likely came about because the nForce4
chipset doesn’t support HD Audio.
Whereas Chaintech and Foxconn skimped on LED indicators, DFI
includes a healthy dose of lights, including a bank of LEDs that light up to
signal where your board is “stuck” if it doesn’t POST correctly. DFI also did a
fair amount of BIOS tinkering,
adding a feature that enables
you to create profiles that can
be accessed at boot. All BIOSes
in this roundup offer a complete
set of features, but this profile
feature—coupled with just
about every other possible set-
ting we could think of—renders
the DFI BIOS our favorite.
In testing, we discovered
the LAN Party board to be
pretty even-steven with MSI’s
submission. What you should
really consider in deciding
between the two are the fea-
tures and configuration
of each board.VERDICT9
Live update can automatically update drivers and BIOS.
Why no extra PCI-E slots?$175 STREET, WWW.MSICOMPUTER.COMVERDICT9
Highly flexible PCI-E configuration
Annoying jumper system for SLI configuration$220 STREET, WWW.DFIWEB.COM