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DFI Infinity NF4 SLI Review - PAGE 2
Geordan Hankinson - Tuesday, September 27th, 2005

Impressions

In comparison with other boards produced by DFI, opening up the Infinity's packaging is not very rewarding. Instead of being treated to multiple boxes containing cords and other accesories, you are presented with an extremely run-of-the-mill package that consists of nothing except for the bare essentials - manual, cd, ide and sata cables, a back panel, and an sli connector. The Infinity's documentation is decidely sparse yet covers everything it needs to for basic use.

The Infinity package is extremely spartan overall. The board is visually uninteresting in comparison to other DFI boards that are available and does not try to stand out from its competitors aesthetically. All Infinity boards are offered in a mustardy yellow with standard color slots.

Board Layout

The board's layout is nothing special, but is intelligent nonetheless. The ram slots are placed with enough distance from the CPU socket to give room for a larger cooler, and are colour coded. The PCI-E x16 slots don't use the annoying 'tab release' function that so many other motherboad makers insist on which makes swapping out different cards much simpler in a crowded case. DFI have also placed one of the x1 PCI-E slots above the SLI setup, guaranteeing that unless you have a GPU with a double sided heatpipe design, you will have at least one x1 slot for future upgrading. Good move DFI.

Everything else about the board is clean and nicely set up. We would have liked colour coding on the front panel connectors, or at least some labelling, but it's nothing a reference to the manual won't remedy. The cmos jumper is of the short variety, which is fairly obnoxious, but we'll manage.

The 4 pin 12 V connector is the only major gripe we have. Why do motherboad makers still insist on placing it at the opposite side of the board to the 12 V connector? This makes neat case wiring difficult and will especially be annoying to Antec P180 owners who will have to run their connector overtop of their video card to reach.

Overall, the board is well set out and will surely please almost anyone that works with it.

next: BIOS »

Article Index

1.Introduction
2.Impressions and Board Layout
3.BIOS
4.Hardware and Test Setup and Winstone
5.HD Tach and Sandra
6.Call of Duty, Halo and UT 2004
7.Comanche and Jedi Knight 2
8.Half Life 2 and Doom 3
9.Overclocking and Conclusion

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