Although DFI is a bit late to deliver the NF3-250Gb based mainboard, they made an excellent board with a good set of features for the Athlon 64 Socket 754 CPU. In our evaluation of this retail boards, we found that the DFI NF3-250Gb has a low performance among all the boards tested. In fact, when we first set the ram timings to CAS 2, 5-2-2 DDR400, we didn't find the performance satisfactory at default speed in comparison with other boards we tested. We confirmed that it could be a BIOS issue. After much investigation, we found some settings that involves queue must be turned on (default is OFF) and that boosted the performance up by around 4%. The board is benchmarked at the tuned up setting. You can check out this page on how we tuned it up. All thanks to the lazy programmers at DFI for dishing such a low performance bios.

This board has very good features set and there is firewire, 4 USB, Gigabit Ethernet, NV Firewall functions on board. It also comes with 4 SATA ports (2 supported by chipset and another 2 by Marvell chipset). The board also comes with 7.1ch audio supported by Realtek alc850 chipset.

This board has plenty of overclocking features as you can see from our 3 pages of BIOS screen shots. Although there are plenty of options, some of the settings are not well known to end users. These settings are probably more specific for DRAM skew and strength, queue length and page faults. CMOS Reloaded is not available in this BIOS and we hope to see it in future BIOS updates. I once spoke to some engineers, they don't even know why they put up so much unknown parameters for.

Installation is straightforward. The only problem is that the retention unit seems to be a bit tight for my OEM heatsink. I would need to ensure that the heatsink really touches the CPU heatspreader. The package has scaled down and FrontX is missing but the UV cables are still provided. No screwdriver or mosfets are provided as part of the bundle.

Overall, DFI has made a super tweakable board which makes overclockers drool. If we can overclock it up to 308 x 8, I think you can do better than we do :) Other than overclocking, the package has scaled down from previous LP boards. You no longer get the FrontX. Pricing is also steep as compared to other boards of the same made. An alternative to this would be the EPoX 8KDA3+ which performs better at default.

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Pros

• Super overclocking options for tweaking
• 4 SATA ports with RAID 0,1 JBOD
• Power Button and Reset Button
• Single chipset

Cons

• No IDE RAID
• No active cooling for chipset heatsink
• BIOS needs more tuning for default performance

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.