DFI Lanparty UT nForce 4 Ultra D - Slots and ports
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Here is where things start getting interesting. The standard NF4 Ultra board will have a 16x PCI-Express slot, and a couple other lesser PCI-Express cards. While there aren’t many cards that use PCI-Express, some of the most advanced ones already come in PCX flavours. This DFI board has 2 16x PCI-Express slots. This is common with the SLI chipset, but not the Ultra. It also has 4x and 1x PCI-Express slots. At the very bottom we find the PCI slots, only 2 of them. PCI may be becoming outdated, but people still have these cards and want to use them.
People have been saying "less is more" for a while, and DFI has listened. The ports that are on this board are ones people will actually use. Gone are the Parallel and serial ports, thank God. I haven’t used either since Windows 95. What we are left with are ports that we will actually use. We have 2 PS/2 ports, S/PDIF connectors, firewire, 6 (that's right, 6) USB ports, and 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports. While dual Gigabit is nice, do we really need it? Most boards have at least one, which is nice for a network, but what purpose does dual gigabit serve? I would have preferred to see another Firewire, or maybe an integrated wireless connection.
The only part I haven’t talked about yet is the sound. There isn’t any integrated sound per say. Though the board does come with sound, it’s isolated on an off-board card. It's a cool idea; you simply plug the little card into the motherboard's pins, and it fits in nicely with the rest of the ports. Don’t expect it match the Audigy sound quality, but it will do as well as other on-board sound.
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