DFI NFII Ultra Infinity

[Flamer]

I would like to say that this new Barton project is alot of fun. If anyone is looking for a cost effective gaming rig this board is worth a look. I bought this board and a 2500+ mobile for around $200 at newegg and it is worth every penny.

System specs

DFI NFII Ultra Infinity
2500+ Barton Mobile
2x512 OCZ pc3700 gold rev.2
ATI 9800xt
Windows XP pro SP1

As most of you know AMD is locking the Barton's, some people are getting lucky and getting them unlocked but the only sure bet for a unlocked chip is the mobile. The chip I have will do 2.7gig watercooled and will do 2.6 with a slk-900 and 92mm fan at 1.8 volts.

The first few days a had the system I ran it 13.5x200 and was tickled pink by a 2.7gig barton. Then I started to try to find the sweet spot, wich is not easy with a bios that has this many tweaks and a unlocked cpu. I am running rock stable the past couple of days at 230x11.5 and I am sure there is more. I am hoping in the next few days to really push it. This board has alot of potential and there are many beta and alpha bioses writen by Oscar Wu at dfi-street.com so finding the best bios for your needs may take time.

This is a great board and CPU combo for anyone who loves to tweak, the possibilities are endless. It is also a nice chioce for the gamer who want's to save some money because dollar for dollar this system will be hard to beat.

The 3700gold rev.2 works very well in this board but I feel a better choice would be the OCZ 4200el because many people are getting 250+ with this board and it's big brother the Lan Party. Or for some low fsb overclocks I am sure some nice bh-5 would be great if you can get it.

All benchmarks were ran @ 230x11.5 2.5,3,3,7
3dmark 2001 19299
sandra cpu bench dhrystone 9965/whetstone 4156
sandra mem bench buffered 3449/3250
super pi 1 million 39sec

[pointreyes]

dfi-street.com? I'm not getting anything other than a coming soon web page. :(

I did not realize you decided to try an Athlon?

I'm Athlon free-what a change. :p

I do like my DFI LANParty 875P with OCZ 4000EL Gold though. :)

[Flamer]

Pointreyes,

I honestly did not have very high expectations when I ordered the board and cpu but this rig rocks:)

Sorry i could not post images for the benchies but I could not figure out how with the new forum setup :lol:

[Paragon]

Hi samcolt,

The image attachment option is under the additional option part of the posting window, see attachment:wave:

[pointreyes]

Pointreyes,

I honestly did not have very high expectations when I ordered the board and cpu but this rig rocks:)

Glad you like it. I like the Athlon but I made a vow to use only motherboards that use the same name for the manufacturer of the proc for the chipset. :rolleyes: However, I do get a kick out of the fact that only my dual Opteron does not have a problem with DivX 3.11alpha codec playback. All of my Intel rigs error out on the codec. :( I sold my dual Athlon system and built a dual Xeon system with a very fast RAID5 SATA configuration.

http://www.abxzone.com/forums/attachment.php?postid=694678

Hehe, looks like RAID0 with Raptors on an ICH5R-but these are Seagate 7200.7 drives on a 133Mhz PCI-X RAIDCore 4852 controller. :cool:

[sodface]

samcolt-

Do you have a link to the 01/21/04 bios for this board, or was this the out of box bios?

I've got the 11/27/03 which is the current one on their site.

[Flamer]

sodface,

Here is a link for the dfi-street bios pages.

http://www.dfi-street.com/bios.html

[sodface]

thx :wave:

[FatClemenza]

The NFII/2500+ Barton combo, even the non-mobile variety, also makes an excellent Linux box, if your into that kind of thing.

[Paragon]

The NFII/2500+ Barton combo, even the non-mobile variety, also makes an excellent Linux box, if your into that kind of thing.

We definitely want to promote open-source here :thumb:

[sodface]

I was trying to squeeze a few more points in on the mem contest and managed to bugger up windows - and then after a reinstall, I screwed the memory timings to the point I had to clear the cmos, which brings me to my point.

And I'm sure it's an obvious one but I'll post it anyway.

This is my first board with raid capability and my first with sata. The default bios setting buried on the bottom of the genie bios section of the bios is sata-raid. I guess this would be fine with a raid setup but I only have a single sata drive right now. I had customized an xp install disk with the drivers I needed (since I don't have a floppy installed to load the sata drivers during install) - after installation the raid controller shows up as unknown hardware. There are 2 drivers available from silicon image, the sata and the sata raid. Windows would not accept the non-raid drivers so I tried the raid drivers and all looked good until reboot and then windows hung at startup. After I found the bios setting to switch from sata raid to plain sata and then rebooted to last known good I was able to update hardware with the non raid drivers. The controller then shows up as a satalink controller, not a raid controller.

This is just a heads up to any other sata newbies like myself who plan on running this board with a single sata drive (or multiple sata but non-raid?) make sure the sata bios selection and the sata drivers you choose to install jive with each other.