The layout
The first clue that the NF4 Ultra-D is not another cookie cutter nForce4 is the board's flashy appearance. If nothing else, the black board and brilliant yellow and orange ports and slots set the NF4 Ultra-D apart visually.

There's more to the board than a daring color scheme, though. With DIMM slots located above the CPU socket (to the right in the picture), the NF4 Ultra-D's layout also deviates from the norm. Moving the DIMM slots closer to the case's rear exhaust fan should help with memory cooling, although moving the CPU socket down the board will make it more difficult for internal power supply fans to exhaust warm air from around the processor.

Fortunately, users won't have to worry about power supply cables creating unnecessary clutter around the CPU socket or other on-board components. Both the NF4 Ultra-D's primary and auxiliary power plugs are neatly tucked in a top (right in the picture) corner of the board. The board's primary connector is a 24-pin plug, but it'll work with 20-pin PSUs.

Getting rid of cable clutter around the CPU socket is always a good thing, but it's especially important on the NF4 Ultra-D because the socket area is already so close to the board's DIMM slots. There's plenty of room around the CPU socket for standard Athlon 64 heat sinks, but gargantuan coolers like Zalman's CNPS7700 may interfere with taller memory modules, especially those with winky-blinky lights.

Clearance is also tight around the NF4 Ultra-D's chipset and PCI Express x16 slots, although this particular layout problem seems to plague most nForce4 motherboards. The chipset's close proximity to the PCI-E x16 slots forces DFI to use a low-profile cooler to ensure clearance for longer graphics cards. Normally, we're not big, er, fans of tiny active chipset coolers, but the NF4 Ultra-D's solution is unique. The cooler uses a "magnetic levitation fan" that's temperature-controlled and surprisingly quiet. Still, I'd prefer the silence and reliability of a taller passive chipset cooler.

You won't find many nForce4 Ultra boards with dual PCI Express x16 slots, and it's also interesting to note that the board has x4 and x1 slots. That extra flexibility should come in handy when PCI Express peripherals become more available.

A decadent array of storage ports populates the other side of the board. With support for four Serial ATA II drives, four "parallel" ATA drives, and multiple RAID 0, 1, and 0+1 arrays that span both SATA and PATA devices, the nForce4 Ultra's storage capabilities are second to none in the Athlon 64 chipset world.

The NF4 Ultra-D's port cluster doesn't offer serial or parallel ports, but you will find six USB ports, Firewire, and a couple of Ethernet jacks. The port cluster also features digital S/PDIF audio input and output ports, and a gaping hole for the board's "Karajan" audio riser.

In an attempt to isolate the NF4 Ultra-D's integrated audio from interference, DFI puts the codec chip and analog audio ports on a riser card that plugs right into the board. The NF4 Ultra-D's box art claims that the Karajan does 24-bit/96kHz audio, but the riser's Realtek ALC850 codec actually only supports resolutions up to 16 bits and sampling rates up to 48kHz.