DFI LanParty UT NF3 250GB
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Dev Hardware Recomended DFI recently entered the overclocker enthusiasts' market with two new board lines, Infinity and LanParty. DMOS tested a board from the LanParty line--and found a lot to be excited about. Read on to discover why it's turning heads.
For overclockers, there are few names as hallowed as ABIT and ASUS. The two Taiwanese heavyweights have pretty much owned the enthusiast market, with a death grip for the better part of a decade. Every now and again, one of the lower tier companies such as EPoX, MSI or Gigabyte release a candidate which threatens to upset the balance, but they rarely follow it up and show continued excellence in this category. EPoX in particular has been maddeningly frustrating to me in this respect; the 4G4A+, 8RDA3+, and 4PDA2+ rev2 are all recent, excellent overclocking boards, but can't seem to pin down a consistent presence in the minds of enthusiasts. DFI is a recent entrant into this market, just in the past year or so. And they've made quite the splash. With their Infinity and LanParty lines, they seem to be determined to aggressively grapple a hold in this fickle arena.
Their recent tour de force is the board we are looking at today, the DFI LanParty UT nF3 250Gb. While that's a lot to chew on, the most interesting part of this board isn't to be found in the name. Check it out: it's based on the socket 754 layout. As opposed to the supposedly higher end s939, DFI went right to where most overclockers have typically been found, the point where cost and performance curves intersect. As of right now, affordable processors on the dual channel socket 939 platform are just a myth, going in and out of stock of large retailers such as NewEgg. And good luck finding these 90nm ghosts at your local retailer. Cheaper Newcastle core s754 A64's are available, as well as the new Sempron 3100+, which we'll be looking at shortly. Those processors based on the single channel platform don't suffer much of a performance deficit, at least not in comparison to what going with less bandwidth does to the competing solutions from Intel. I'm sure there will shortly be a followup to this board on that layout, as soon as the mysterious 90nm s939 chips find themselves more available in retail.
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