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Introduction

Making a big transition is never easy. I don't know if DFI's move from being an OEM board manufacturer to a high end enthusiast company should even be classified as a transition as the chasm between the two spheres seems huge. The strategy and focus change seems to have worked for DFI though as they have literally exploded onto the enthusiast scene on the strength of a few very highly regarded products. While it is easy to want to change, the devil is in the details and in the case of motherboards, it is the implementation that matters the most.

Socket 939 and PCIe is an important one for a lot of mainboard manufacturers as the last eight months or so must have been a marketing nightmare for a lot of companies with the continual transitions, first the move to Socket 939 from 754 then the subsequent move from AGP to PCIe. Both were branded as must have features to be on the cutting edge so it must have been a hard sell to try to promote older technologies heavily. In the late fall, NVIDIA gave an even more compelling reason to wait: SLI. With the nForce 4 SLI chipset, power users would be able to harness the power of two identical GeForce 6 cards and almost double the graphical horsepower. The nForce 4 SLI chipset can only be described a perfect fit into DFI's mould - both DFI and NVIDIA are aiming for the high end, high performance, power user crowd. The only question is how good is DFI's implementation of the nForce 4 SLI and we will answer that question today with a look at the LanParty nF4 SLI-DR.