The DFI LANParty NF4 SLI-DR EXPERT EDITION

[One4yu2c]

Originally Posted by Tuathal

Greetings everyone, I'm new to the board, but wanted to jump in on this post.

There he is - good to see you make it over here Tuathal!

[threadhijack=short] Tuathal (Chris) is a good friend of mine and fellow enthusiast. One of the busiest and smartest people I know as well as an all-around good guy, he'll fit right in here at HL. :) [/threadhijack]

Originally Posted by gvblake22

Yes, welcome to the forums Tuathal. Good to see a fellow Michigander around here :D
<-- From Traverse City and go to school near Grand Rapids...

I was meaning to ask you that (where in MI you are located). I'm a hop, skip, and a jump away down in Portage/Kalamazoo area. 8)

[gvblake22]

Originally Posted by One4yu2c

I was meaning to ask you that (where in MI you are located). I'm a hop, skip, and a jump away down in Portage/Kalamazoo area. 8)

Sweet! You are pretty close indeed! This weather has been pretty crappy lately hasn't it

[Tuathal]

So Many Quotes to respond to - So little time ;)

Thanks for the great greets all! I'm just outside of Flint myself - Yeah for Flin... Well... Er... Go Michigan! :)

As far as the board (DFI LanParty SLI-DR) itself goes.... I have loved every aspect of this board since the moment I installed it. One4 and I spent quite a bit of time in discussion between this board, MSI's SLI Deluxe, and Asus's offerings, and the DFI finally won out, more do to past experience issues with MSI and ASUS product offerings on the AMD side than for anything specific about the DFI itself. I've done a little OC work in the past, usually not more than a 10% increase (at most), so the BIOS features - while a curiosity - were not my primary choice for using this board.

I'm actually not even running the 3500+ in OC mode at the moment. I read a lot of reports about problems getting these boards to run correctly right out of the box, but I had the system built and installing Windows in less than an hour. After some testing was done, I did (a little) cable management work on the box, and then ran more burn-in type tests and have yet to have a single issue with the machine.

As far as the Northbridge goes, while there is clearance between it and the video card - I would have preferred the changes in the expert edition to have shown up on this board as well, but everything runs just fine as is.

The biggest caveat I have for people is in dealing with the NorthBridge - I found that (oddly enough) running this board in a mid-tower case - there was a 3 degree (celsius) drop in temperature as long as I did NOT run a HDD in the slot directly in front of the northbridge fan.
My current Temps are:
CPU (Full Load): 30c
NorthBridge: 31c
Case: 26c

I have since tested the board with other RAM, etc. and will say that if you choose to go with the LanParty line of boards, I wouldn't even bother attempting to run any form of Value RAM. The only problems I've encountered is trying to run ValueRAM (Be it Mushkin, OCZ, Crucial, etc) in the board. A few times it wouldn't boot at all with it, but mostly I just saw such sluggishness in the system that it wasn't even worth it.


Hope that helps with everyone :)

Cheers,
Tuathal

[gvblake22]

Hmm, interesting observations Tuathal. Thanks!

[Tuathal]

Thanks :)

I realized that I got to work without any photos of the board with me, so I'll have to dump some on my External HDD to do a more thorough "forum review" of the board for you guys. In some discussions I've had with other SLI-DR board owners I've had, I'm wondering if some of the BIOS settings that I just set (or at least verified), by default, might have had something to do with the fact that the board ran so efficiently and error-free from the start. I'll do my best to provide some more clear info in the next several days :)


Cheers,
Tuathal