Conclusions
DFI's LANParty UT RDX200 CD-DR maintains a lot of what we've liked about the LANParty line, including an original layout, plenty of BIOS tweaking potential, overclocking options that cooperate with Cool'n'Quiet, and a unique visual flair that sets it apart from the sea of enthusiast-oriented mobos on the market. The RDX200 also has the unique distinction of being the only CrossFire board currently available in North America. However, CrossFire's cachet is admittedly muted at the moment. We're still waiting for Radeon X1800 master cards to arrive, effectively limiting CrossFire to older Radeon X800-series GPUs.

CrossFire may be relatively new, but the problems we've noted with this board's I/O performance have plagued ATI south bridges for some time. The SB450's USB performance is much slower than that of the competition, and there appear to be some very serious issues with the chip's PCI implementation that are hampering peripheral performance. We're not talking about performance differences of only a couple of percent here, either.

The SB450 is also missing several key storage-related features that are available in competing chipsets. The south bridge doesn't support 300MB/s Serial ATA transfer rates or Native Command Queuing, and we've found that the latter can definitely have an impact on performance during disk-intensive multitasking. RAID support is also weak, with the SB450 limited to only RAID 0 and 1 arrays. DFI tries to make up for this shortcoming with a Silicon Image SATA controller that adds support for RAID 0+1 and RAID 5, but its performance appears to be crippled by the chipset's slow PCI implementation.

Were the RDX200 cheaper than its competition, it might be easier to forgive the board's flaws. However, with a street price hovering around $200, the RDX200 is considerably more expensive than competing nForce4 SLI motherboards, and it's just $10 cheaper than Asus's nForce4 SLI X16-powered A8N32-SLI. To DFI's credit, the RDX200's audio implementation is superior to that of most nForce4 boards, but High Definition Audio alone can't make up for the motherboard's other shortcomings. With nForce4 SLI motherboards, including DFI's own, available for much less, it's hard to recommend the RDX200.