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Summary

This is a summary review of the DFI LanParty SLI-DR motherboard.  For the full review, with all our detailed layout, features and performance analysis, click on to our Expert review pages. 

DFI's LanParty NF4 SLI-DR motherboard comes as the third motherboard to hit PC Perspective that supports NVIDIA's new SLI technology.  It has a lot to live up to with the Asus A8N-SLI and the Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI coming before it. 

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The feature list on the new DFI SLI-DR motherboard is rather impressive, including a lot of storage and accessory options.  There are eight channels of SATA supported on the motherboard courtesy of the NVIDIA chipset and another third-party chip.  Two IDE channels should allow you to carry over most of your IDE hard drives and optical drives to the new PCI Express-based system.  For networking, DFI included two Gigabit networking connections, currently the fastest consumer standard on the market.  There are also numerous USB 2.0 jacks on the back of the board as well as a Firewire port for multimedia accessories. 

The DFI LanParty NF4 SLI-DR motherboard supports the NVIDIA SLI technology, which allows you to connect two identical PCI Express GPUs for increased graphics performance.  For a complete look at the new SLI technology, please read our SLI technology review.

You also get a lot of extras in the box with this motherboard including a computer carrying case, UV reacting wire sheathing, four SATA data and power cables, rounded IDE cables and more. 

If you want more information on the layout of the board, or the features that are included with it, please read our full, detailed review of the motherboard as well. 

Let's take a look at a few benchmarks to see how the DFI motherboard stands up against its competition.

The DFI SLI-DR motherboard performed very well in our suite of tests, matching or beating the best from both Asus and Gigabyte in the majority of our results.  You can get all the tests and benchmarks in the full review, linked below.

Overall, I was very impressed with this offering from DFI.  Everything from the board layout to the BIOS design and the feature set was well thought out.  The buyer of this motherboard is going to get pretty much everything they need as well as a stable platform going forward into 2005 and beyond for upgrade options including PCI Express graphics and dual-core processors from AMD.  Please check out the full review on the next page for all the data, but we at PC Perspective are proud to present the DFI LanParty NF4 SLI-DR motherboard with our Gold Award! 

Be sure to use our price checking engine to find the best prices on the new DFI SLI-DR, and anything else you may want to buy!

Next Page - Introduction and Specifications

Review Index:
- Select - Summary Introduction and Specifications Board Layout and Features Included Software and Extras SLI Graphics Card Installation BIOS Features BIOS Features (cont'd) System Setup and Testing Methods Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra, AIDA32 and Cachemem Gaming: Quake III and UT2003 Gaming: X2 and 3DMarks Gaming: Doom 3 and Far Cry 1.3 Application: Winstones and World Bench 5 Application: DivX, MP3 and Data Compression, PCMark04 Professional: CineBench 2003 and KribiBench 1.1 Professional: SPECviewperf 7.1 Scientific: ScienceMark 2.0 Beta Issues and Conclusions