DFI LanParty NF4 Expert - initial impressions

[Angry_Games]

well i've just stopped Prime95 @ 13h 30m mark and will be entering it into the OC Database in the next 15 minutes or so (OCZ Gold PC3200 BH-5 UTT, San Diego 4000+)

[dinos22]

yeah even ran it at 100 divider ..

 

1.45 vcore on a sli-dr ran 2950 rock stable ..

 

ive heard from some people over at xs forums .. that they had to crank the vcore WAY up to match their same overclocks on the original sli-dr ?

 

 

im just too nervous to crank the vcore up to 1.65 like some peopel have hide .. the opty still idles at like 23c .. and loads around 34c on air

it seems that older boards are overvolting up to 0.11v which could explain your misterious loss of MHz.........check the Opteron overclocking thread for more info

[Squid1]

yeah even ran it at 100 divider ..

 

1.45 vcore on a sli-dr ran 2950 rock stable ..

 

ive heard from some people over at xs forums .. that they had to crank the vcore WAY up to match their same overclocks on the original sli-dr ?

 

 

im just too nervous to crank the vcore up to 1.65 like some peopel have hide .. the opty still idles at like 23c .. and loads around 34c on air

 

You need to invest in a $20 digital multimeter.

[dinos22]

You need to invest in a $20 digital multimeter.

don't know how reliable those cheap ones are really........i mean eva2000 posted that his cheap multimeter showed 0.2V difference (overvolting) which clearly isn't right.....maybe borrow a good from from someone

[jetjaguar]

weird .. i had this board up to 1.63 in the bios and still no go on stability ..

 

dunno what is going on

[Angry_Games]

booyah, first NF4 Expert entry in the OC Database!

 

http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showthread...8283#post288283

 

 

 

going to fool around with some TCCD I think tomorrow (I've got an Opteron 146 but I am going to crank that in my modded Ultra-D to SLI-D Nf4 board that I know backwards and forwards with about every kit of RAM i have lol

 

 

 

so far the Expert board is....different

 

I can't rush out and say it so super supreme awesome-O that I would kill people to have one

 

 

but I can also not say that this board is a piece of junk

 

 

It is just different.

 

OPB was right that Drive Strenght rules all on this board...I really had to fool with Drive Strength and Data Drive Strenght to get anywhere.

 

 

 

 

 

I feel about the same with this board as I did with the first NF4 SLI-DR that I received back at the end of January of this year...I immediately had problems fooling with it, but stuck with it for a few days and got her overclocked just fine finally....and it was not really until the 3/16 bios that the board blew up (in terms of overclocking...blowing up is good! it means once I jacked the 3/16 bios in it, it started to fly like no other board I have ever had, and by 5/10...these things were setting records in overclocking and benchmark scores).

 

 

so to sum it up...with BH-5 (and that is all I used on teh first SLI-DR in January), I am finding some good clocking. I will continue to fool with it for a good long time as it looks to be a strong overclocker

 

 

 

BUT

 

 

YOU CANNOT JUST PLUG YOUR SETTINGS FROM YOUR NF4 LANPARTY BOARD YOU HAVE NOW INTO THIS AND EXPECT THE SAME RESULTS

 

it just aint gonna happen

 

it is a different tune job on the bios than the NF4 Ultra-D/SLI that most of you have now. If you think you are just going to plug all your hardware and settings from the current NF4 into the Expert NF4 and fly even faster....you are dead wrong.

 

but I can estimate that ONCE YOU FIGURE OUT HOW THIS BIOS IS DIFFERENT WITH YOUR SAME HARDWARE, and fine-tune it until you are bleeding internally from the overclock you got going on, you will more than likely get even more out of your clocking than you could on the great Lanparty NF4 Ultra-D/SLI

 

 

 

 

for all of you new people, and for all of you old members, and anyone that has not seen me say such a thing, I'll repeat it for everyone:

 

it takes me and Rgone 2-8 weeks to truly know our board. Closer to the 8 weeks than 2 weeks especially on the NF4's.

 

Keep in mind we play with these things every single day, and we have our 'hand picked' hardware that wasn't hand picked when we bought or received it, but we've had 6 months to a year or more to test some of the hardware so it is OUR hand picking it as our most Premium components.

 

and it still takes us weeks to truly get intimate with the boards. We have to, it is our job.

 

so what does this mean?

 

for those of you that are no-time tinkerers, or part-time tinkerers, or even decent-time tinkerers, you cannot expect to get this board and just go go go go go (unless you have a stroke of good luck).

 

Even you guys that are better overclockers than me...you are not going to 'know' these boards within the first 3 days you have them. They are designed and built to be tweaked and tweaked and tweaked. That is their purpose. And they are different than any other board you own, and the bios looks the same as your current NF4, but there's a couple of settings in there that REALLY make a HUGE difference in how things work (mainly DRAM Drive Strenght and DRAM Data Drive Strength).

 

 

 

Oskar will continue to push out bioses as more of you get the board and we get more and more time to fiddle with it and find out what works and what doesn't and what can be changed...as well as the bioses that will fix specific issues (none for me at the moment, but, with ANY board, no matter who builds it, when thousands of users get it in their hands, you see incompatibilities and other problems always crop up that just could never have been tested for because the factor of millions of hardware combinations could never be realized in any lab)

 

so bioses will be coming...there were a lot of them for the NF4, you can expect them to sometimes trickle, sometimes flood, but they'll be there (just like the RDX200 will have bioses...for those of you that keep asking)

 

 

anyway, thats the testing on OCZ Gold PC3200 BH-5 UTT at the moment

 

I'll have more in the coming days including a new video of how to put it together

[dinos22]

noticed you're on that 11/11 bios......what differences did you see from shipping bios .....

[Squid1]

don't know how reliable those cheap ones are really........i mean eva2000 posted that his cheap multimeter showed 0.2V difference (overvolting) which clearly isn't right.....maybe borrow a good from from someone

 

I must have missed that post. Mine works as advertised, but I think it was $200 in 1991 or somesuch.

 

I honestly don't know how good cheap ones are, but you can easily check that by comparing with another DMM. I would assume they are certainly better than the motherboard sensor.

[PC-Tuner]

One question though do we have to reinstall windows , switching from SLI-DR to the expert?

 

Yes, this is a very good question !

 

I´m changing from the SLI-D to the Expert and the drivers are the same. I think XP must be activated again.

 

Must I reinstall XP (I hope no because I have 3 OS installed) ??

 

 

I phoned to Enermax Germany and they said that using a 4pin-8pin converter is on a EG701 is no problem (with 2xGTX, too) !

[xgman]

No.

[PC-Tuner]

No.

 

What no ? The converter or the reinstall of XP (have u tried it ?) ?

 

THX !

[magnuspah]

With changing the motherboard, MS considers it as changing 2 parts out of 10, so no reactivation. It is only when you change 3 parts or two majoy parts that MS requires reactivation. God, I have done enough of this...it is a pain but worse come to worse, just call them and reactivate. When I changed from the Asus to DFI, I did not have to reactivate. It was only later within a few weeks that I then changed CPU and hard drive that I had to reactivate.