A little "past its prime," but still very good.
Written: Jul 16 '05 (Updated Aug 06 '09)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Very stable, super overclocking capability, strong feature set.
Cons: Some new technologies are not supported.
The Bottom Line: This was a five-star-plus board a year ago. Even with no PCI-E or Socket 939, it's still very good today.
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| jsc1973's Full Review: DFI LANPARTY UT nF3 (LPUT-NF3250GB) Motherboard |
It was about a year ago, give or take a few months, when the DFI LanParty UT NF3 250Gb motherboard was released to the enthusiast community. It was designed mainly as a motherboard for the most demanding of power users--gamers and hard-core overclockers, and was arguably the first A64 platform to meet those users' needs while maintaining a modicum of stability.
For the late summer of 2004, this motherboard's list of features was impressive. It included full support for all AMD Athlon64 processors in the Socket-754 form factor, allowed for the wide variety of voltage, HyperTransport and memory bus settings that the overclocking community wanted (and they actually worked), and support for up to 3 gigabytes of RAM.
That wasn't all. The board had one-board connectors for up to four Serial ATA hard drives, plus two standard IDE ports which could support four more hard drives or optical drives. It was blessed with an AGP 8x slot for the fastest video cards out there, and perhaps most importantly for gamers, a built-in Gigabit Ethernet port which wasn't run off the PCI bus, but instead off the nForce3 chipset itself. As a result, PCI-related bottlenecks on the ethernet connection were eliminated. Anyone using this motherboard in a gaming "LAN Party" (hence the board's name) had a major advantage over a user with a PCI-based ethernet setup.
It debuted to rave reviews and was the hard-core enthusiast board of choice for most AMD users until well into 2005. Until the advent of the newer nForce4 chipset, the PCI-Express bus for video cards and the increasing popularity of new Socket-939 Athlon64s with support for dual-channel RAM, the NF3 250Gb was about as good as it got.
But it's now July of 2005, and Socket 939 and PCI-Express are here to stay. Socket 754 is a budget platform now, restricted to no A64s above a 3700+ rating and 32-bit only Sempron processors. But it says here that the NF3 250Gb still has life. It may be a budget platform now, but if it is, it's one heck of a budget platform.
It can't do some things, like run PCI-Express video cards and especially the new SLI and CrossFire techniques for using two video cards at once. Nor can it run a dual-core Athlon64 chip. But it can still hum along with up to 12 drives, including all the latest fast hard disks in RAID mode, if you like. And it can push any S754 Athlon64 or Sempron to the limit. Overclocks of 40 percent are sometimes reported on these motherboards. And if your graphics requirements don't require the services of an SLI setup, there are still plenty of very fast video cards on the AGP platform.
Most importantly, the board is rock-solid stable. My own setup, using the board on a system assembled in March, includes an A64 3000+ (2 GHz) running at a speed of 2.2 GHz, along with a slew of expansion cards and a Radeon 9700 AIW video card. In four months, the Windows XP Pro system installed has crashed just once, as a result of a bad software program I installed. No hardware-based failures at all, on an overclocked platform, in four months. Not bad at all.
I can still recommend this motherboard, even at its current price tag of around $100, because of its overall quality and still very formidable performance capabilities. One should be aware of its lack of PCI-Express and Socket 939 CPU support, but PCI-E is only required for video cards targeted at hardcore gamers, and AMD is still producing Socket 754 processors and will for some time to come.
****Update August 8, 2007****
I retired this board from my main rig this spring, at which time it was still going strong, but I needed more computer horsepower (see my review of the AsRock 775Dual-VSTA). The LanParty UF3 lives on, however, in another machine that went to someone needing a better computer. Anyone reading this review now would only be shopping for one of these on the used market, but for anyone who is, my experience makes me think the board is durable over long-term use and a good choice as a second-hand purchase.
****Update August 6, 2009****
Two years later, and the motherboard is still going strong as a hand-me-down. In fact, it has outlived the original A64 processor that was installed in it, and now sports an overclocked Sempron. This was a wonderful motherboard in its day...
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 119
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Epinions.com ID:
jsc1973
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Member: John
Location: Raleigh NC
Reviews written: 36
Trusted by: 6 members
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