DFI Infinity nF4 Ultra Motherboard Review

Ever since our first motherboard review here at Ninjalane we have had a sort of soft spot for trimmed down motherboards. These boards typically offered more in terms of upgradeability (user controlled) and were, in most cases, less expensive. Sadly the days of a barebones motherboard are gone, but inexpensive products still exist. The Infinity series goes a long way in offering onboard features at a fraction of the cost while still giving the legendary BIOS features found in the higher end LanParty boards.

The general layout of the components was decent, Power, and HDD connections are easily accessible and significantly out of the way as to not interfere with case cooling and we like how the memory slots are located across the top of the motherboard. (something we saw early on with the Soltek designs). The brown/gold PCB was somewhat of a disappointment, the Red PCB found on previous Infinity boards would have been awesome. The only other potential layout issue is in the location of the MCP in relation to the 16x PCI Express slot. Chipset cooler are generally low profile as to clear expansion cards but aftermarket solutions are not. As you can imagine a normal sized chipset cooler will cause clearance problems with full length video cards and the majority of waterblocks are out of the question.

In this review Overclocking was not what we expected, this could have been due to the new Crucial memory that we have started using or a combination between the new memory and the undersized MCP cooler, given that this little guy gets rather hot even under normal load it really the only weak spot component wise on the motherboard. In either case new hardware requires new approach to the overclocking problem with sometimes unexpected results.

Now for the ever popular list of Good things and Bad things.

LanParty features in a low cost motherboard
Excellent real-world performance
"Ready to run" configuration
nForce4 Ultra chipset with RAID

Layout issues limit aftermarket chipset cooling
Brown PCB reduces "hey I got this" bling factor
Rather disappointing overclocking experience

I would like to thank DFI for helping to make this review possible.