DFI LANParty UT RDX200 CD-DR

DFI continues to plate gold upon itself.

DFI is the Cinderella of the motherboard world. A few years back its creations were the poor, dishevelled stepsisters of ASUS and ABIT, relegated to scrubbing the budget floors. But lately it has come into its own as one of the motherboard manufacturers of choice for power users, offering exceptional performance and a raft of features, not to mention hallucinogenic colour schemes. The DFI LANParty UT RDX200 is its latest foray into the mobo world, but has the clock struck midnight for this ATI-powered beast?

Based around ATI’s Crossfire compatible RD480 Northbridge and SB450 Southbridge, this 6-layer board aims to stick it to nForce4 SLI motherboards, although the lack of specialised CrossFire cards in the retail channel means it’s facing an uphill battle.

It’s the first ATI based motherboard we’ve seen to feature the Azalia High Definition audio chip, and this is included on its own separate board, helping to isolate it from system static. All capacitors are of the Japanese variety, ensuring a lengthy life span for this Day-Glo creation, which ships with UV reactive cabling. Storage suckers will appreciate the bank of eight SATA ports – four of which use the ATI SB450 Southbridge, while the other four are powered by a Silicon Image 3114 controller. Sadly this means the board is stuck with SATA1, with no support for SATA2. A handy clear CMOS button means you won’t be fiddling with needle nosed pliers to clear your CMOS, and the increasingly rare inclusion of a FireWire port will be a godsend for vidiots.
Dual Gigabit LAN is also standard.
Overclockers will love the range of tweaking options to be found on this board; it’s arguably the most fiddle-friendly BIOS we’ve ever encountered. Memory voltage can be boosted to a sizzling 4.03V, while the memory bus can be pumped all the way up to DDR500 speeds without a problem.

But where the memory system really stands on its own is the ability to run four double-sided DIMMs at a 1T Command Rate and a CAS of 1.5 – this is a world first for four DIMMs, and according to AMD’s own technical specifications, shouldn’t actually be possible yet. To ensure you’ll be able to hit this record-breaking speed, it’s best to use Crucial Ballistix 1GB DIMMs, as the board has been optimized for this particular memory type. This should give you up to a 10% increase in memory sensitive applications, but the catch is that you’ll have to run your memory at close to DDR400 speeds. If you’d rather run your memory at speeds approaching DDR500, you’ll be limited to a 2T command rate.

When it came time to put the heat on our 2.2GHz Athlon 64 3800+ CPU, the LANParty didn’t disappoint. We successfully squeezed 2.8GHz out of the board on air-cooling, which is equal to the best results we’ve seen from comparable nForce4 motherboards, and it didn’t take fusion-powered levels of voltage to reach this speed. The stock performance of the board was up to scratch as well, being right in line with an nForce4-based motherboard, as expected from the ATI chipset that the board uses.

So it performs beautifully, has more overclocking options than an Atomican would know what to do with, and introduces record-breaking memory performance. But there are a couple of hitches that we grudgingly have to admit. For starters, it’s not the cheapest high performance board you’ll find, with an asking price of around $350. By far the biggest issue however is the fact that it’s based around the ATI CrossFire solution. CrossFire cards are still hard to come by, and are significantly more expensive than NVIDIA 7800GTX cards. As a result we’d still point towards an NVIDIA nForce4 SLI based system for the ultimate in performance at a respectable price. However, this board goes a long way to recover the ground ATI lost over the previous twelve months, and if CrossFire becomes more affordable and available, this board will prove that this Cinderella needn’t turn back into a frump anytime soon.