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DFI Infinity nF4 Ultra Motherboard Review

Author: Dennis Garcia

Published: Monday, October 17, 2005

Board Layout and Features

One thing about onboard features is that mfgs have a difficult time deciding between what to offer vs what will ever get used. We find that Firewire seems to be one of those features. The DFI Infinity does come with come with an onboard Firewire option so iPod and closet Macintosh users can sleep easy.

Overall board layout is a little strange, As the photos indicate the MCP chip is located a considerable distance from the processor. While this frees up room around the processor it also means that clearance between video cards and replacement coolers is considerably reduced.

While gigabit switches and networking gear are still rather expensive more and more motherboards are coming with gigabit LAN capabilities onboard. A phy chip is used to translate the digital LAN signals from the MCP into a suitable LAN connection such as RJ45 or fiber optics.

HDD connections come in the form of onboard SATA2 connections and the standard array of PATA connectors for a total of 8 available drive slots. It should be noted that SATA2 is one of the extra features found in the nF4 Ultra chipset that is not available on the non-ultra version.

Additional HDD RAID is supported using the onboard nVidia RAID capabilities. One nice feature of this is the ability to specify what ports you wish to dedicate to RAID within the BIOS.