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The Board

The DFI LanParty takes a page from the styling cues of another highend NForce 2 board in the Chaintech Zenith with an attractive black and green color scheme.

Unlike the Chaintech however, the front panel connectors are labeled very well. One of the unique features about the LanParty Ultra B are the reset and power buttons on the actual board in addition to the headers. For people testing the board before mounting it into a case, this is a god send and eliminates the need to have to short connectors with jumpers or anything of that nature. We complained previously about unlabelled front panel connectors and now it more often the norm than not. Other manufacturers should clue in with the onboard power and reset buttons because they are incredibly useful also.

Those that are into the case mod scene will be happy to know that the plastic on the motherboard is also UV reactive so under UV light, it glows.

Can you say bling?

The layout of the board is pretty typical of Athlon XP boards. A good design decision is the positioning of the DIMM slots. Unlike a lot of boards from that generation, the AGP card does not have to be removed to fiddle with the memory. The LanParty is restricted to 3 DIMM slots which is not a bad thing either as there were varied reports of instability with all 4 DIMM slots populated on Nforce 2 boards.

The rear panel offers both SPDIF in and out along with dual NICs and 5 mini jacks good enough for 5.1 out, a mic input and a line in. The north and south bridges are passively cooled. My feelings on a passive solution are mixed; on one hand it is less noisy and cannot break, but on the other hand active cooling can allow the end user to eek out a bit more performance.