AM2 + NF4 Platform, The Product Review of DFI Infinity ULTRA II-M2
After AMD announced its new product, AM2 processors to the market on 2006/5/23,
NVIDIA also released NF5 550/570/590 chipsets to the market.
Comparing NF4 and NF5 platform,
NF4 platform is equipped with 2 IDE/4 SATA connections, and Socket 939 with DDR.
NF5 platform is equipped with 1 IDE/6 SATA connections, and Socket AM2 with DDR II.
NF5 590 products come with new DRAM EPP technology, but we see no big change in other aspects
DFI lately announced its new low cost AM2 NF4 motherboard solution to media.
Following, we will show you what this new AM2 could do on NF4 platform.
Now let us take a look of this new DFI NF Ultra II-M2:
http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/456/num11yz.jpg
The lower left hand corner of this motherboard:
This new product is equipped with NF4 Ultra chipset, but it come with two of PCIE slots.
Does that mean users could modify this motherboard to SLI mode?
http://img230.imageshack.us/img230/2867/num24xq.jpg
The lower right hand corner of this motherboard:
Now the low cost products line “Infinity” also started to have built-in Power/Reset button. This will make any type of test much easier without chassis.
http://img235.imageshack.us/img235/2603/num38rk.jpg
The upper right hand corner of this motherboard,
NF4 has two built-in IDE channels, in my personal opinion, it is more sufficient than only one built-in IDE channels on NF5 chipset.
Most of the capacitors near CPU are Japanese made; some of small capacitors were made by OST.
http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/3584/num41cn.jpg
PCIE express pipeline setting still use the well known unique Jumper blocks.
And this time, DFI also put the Chinese words of “Infinity” on PCB printing.
http://img473.imageshack.us/img473/5306/num58ae.jpg
Rear IO connectors:
http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/6761/num66bi.jpg
Test environment
CPU:AMD AM2 Althon64 X2 4800+
MB: DFI INFINITY ULTRAII-M2
DRAM:Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C3
VGA:ELSA 6800Ultra
HD:Seagate 7200.7 80GB
POWER:AcBel 550W
Cooler:Tower112
DDR II 800 1T 3-3-3-9 2.1V stable,
AM2’s performance on NF4 platform is just as good as it could be on NF5.
The new hardware monitoring utility.
Chipset temperature over 60 degrees? The temperature used to be just over 50 degrees on Lanparty NF4 series.
We were told Infinity Ultra II- M2 thermal sensor is located much closer to chipset, which means the temperature reading would be more accurate.
But it seems both NVIDIA NF4/NF5 platforms are quit “hot”.
http://img482.imageshack.us/img482/3139/8001t2cq.jpg
On this below 100 U.S dollar motherboard, Infinity Ultra II-M2,
We saw a trend of improvement on many aspects, including better design, better overclock capability, and better material selection. It is obviously a great news to market competition.
Introduction about BIOS setting, SLI modification and 3D ultimate performance of this new product will be the contents in our next review.
