by Rob Williams on July 4, 2005 in Motherboards
DFI knows that hardcore gamers are interested in a motherboard with huge overclockability and modding potential. We are taking a look at the UT Ultra-D NF4, which promises just that.
Since this board is touted as a Enthusiasts/Gamers motherboard, it has all the latest ‘candy’ in terms of features. The chipset it uses is the popular nForce 4 Ultra, which adds support for PCI-Express and the Socket 939 processors. Even though the “Ultra” NF4 is meant for Single GPU solutions, it is possible to have the board operate with SLi (Scalable Link Interface), if you choose to do so. This chipset also supports DDR in Dual Channel mode up to DDR400, but of course you can use faster DDR1 memory if you like.
DFI chose to use the Phoenix AwardBIOS for the board. They also added a feature called the ‘CMOS Reloaded’, which we will get into shortly. Depending on when you bought your Ultra-D, you may need to update the included BIOS in order to add the proper support for the Venice and San Diego core. This was fixed with version 310 BIOS, so you will want to make sure you have it.
Without getting into the extreme specifics, here are the basic specs and an official picture of the board. You can click to enlarge the image if you like.
CPU Support
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AMD Socket 939 – 64/64 FX/Sempron
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Chipset
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NVIDIA nForce 4 Ultra
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FSB
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2000MT/s HyperTransport interface
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Memory
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Four 184-pin DDR SDRAM DIMM sockets Supports dual channel (128-bit wide) memory interface Supports up to 4GB system memory Supports DDR266, DDR333 and DDR400 DDR SDRAM DIMM
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BIOS
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Award BIOS w/ CMOS Reloaded
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Sound
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Realtek AC’97 8 Channel
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LAN
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Dual Gigabit LAN – Vitesse VSC8201 Gigabit Phy and Marvell 88E8001 Gigabit PCI
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Expansion Slots
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(2) PCI-E 16x, (1) PCI-E 4x, (1) PCI-E 1x, (2) PCI
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IDE
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(2) IDE 133, (4) S-ATA II
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Etcetera
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(1) IEEE 1394. (6) USB 2.0
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For the complete specification table, you can visit the Official Site.
Packaging & Contents
As usual, DFI did a great job on the box art. It’s obvious which type of motherboard this is geared towards. He even has an unmarked Bawls sitting on his desk! Opening the box, we unveil all the tightly packed cables and other necessities.
In the third above picture, we can see all the included contents. Notice the yellow plastic sleeved IDE cables. a definite nice touch. The S-ATA cables also match that scheme. They even included a floppy IDE with the plastic sleeving, in case you need your floppy drive hooked up. Also in the picture is a S-ATA power connector, rear case shield, audio add-on, extra jumpers and finally some documentation.
Click on any image that you want to see a full version of. Let’s now take a closer look at the board.