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.
As mentioned in the intro, this is not a hardcore in-depth review, so we won’t get too deep into benchmarking, but we will hit the bases. The system will be run completely un-overclocked, and then with a max overclock. Here are the system specs:
Stock: Venice 3200+ @ 2.0GHz, DFI Ultra-D, Crucial Ballistix PC4000 @ 200MHz 2-2-2-6, BFG 6800 GT OC 370/1000, WD 160GB 7200RPM
Overclocked: Venice 3200+ @ 2.7GHz, DFI Ultra-D, Crucial Ballistix PC4000 @ 315MHz 3-4-4-10, BFG 6800 GT OC 370/1000, WD 160GB 7200RPM
For the benchmarks, I chose to use some of the most common ones, without getting too far into detail. I personally love using EVEREST for the memory benchmarking, and SANDRA for the CPU Multi-Media test. For a quick CPU benchmark, I used Super Pi 1.4 mod.
To test the system all around, I used 3D Mark 2001, using default settings. Doom III was run at 640*480 with minimal detail, Far Cry at 800*600 with minimal detail and finally, Half-Life 2 at 640*480 with minimal detail. dBPowerAmp was used to convert a 43.3MB .WAV file to .MP3 (Lame).
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Stock
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Overclock
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EVEREST Memory Read
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5632 MB/s
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7616 MB/s
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EVEREST Memory Write
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2114 MB/s
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2729 MB/s
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EVEREST Memory Latency
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45.2ns
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39.3ns
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Super Pi: 1Million
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42.062 seconds
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32.172 seconds
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SANDRA Multi-Media
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Integer 19167 it/s Floating-Point 20616it/s
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Integer 25778 it/s Floating-Point 27711it/s
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3D Mark ’01
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22667 Marks
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26354 Marks
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Doom III
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85.4 FPS
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107.4 FPS
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Far Cry
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126.41 FPS
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143.92 FPS
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Half-Life 2
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59 FPS
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59.7 FPS
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Wav to MP3 (43.3MB)
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13 seconds
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10 seconds
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The benches have come out fantastic. Further reason to love the 702 BIOS update, is the fact that the max Memory Read went from the previous max of 7300MB/s to 7616MB/s. That extra push to the memory didn’t really affect the Write or Latency though.
Overall, as you can see from the before and after benchmarking specs, the Ultra-D certainly won’t hold you back on your overclock.