One of the latest motherboards to revisit the nForce4 SLI is DFI's LANParty UT NF4 SLI-DR Expert. Don't let the unnecessarily awkward name put you off, though. DFI has built the Expert with serious overclocking in mind, and endowed it with everything you'd expect from a high-end enthusiast board, including dual PCI Express x16 slots, auxiliary Gigabit Ethernet and Serial ATA RAID chips, six board layers and four-phase power, and a BIOS brimming with tweaking and overclocking options.

Of course, enthusiasts desire more than checkbox features. Performance is what we really crave, and the NF4 SLI-DR Expert delivers that in spades. Not only is it the fastest Athlon 64 motherboard we've ever tested, it's also the most overclockable, by a long shot. Keep reading for more on DFI's Expert respin of NVIDIA's classic nForce4 SLI chipset.

The specs

The nForce4 SLI chipset may have been released well over a year ago, but its feature set is still competitive with most of the Athlon 64 core logic available on the market. In addition to 20 lanes of PCI Express connectivity, which can of course be split between a pair of graphics cards in SLI, the nForce4 SLI is blessed with a storage controller that can do both ATA and Serial ATA RAID. Advanced Serial ATA features like 300MB/s transfer rates and Native Command Queuing are supported, as well. Four Serial ATA ports apparently weren't enough for DFI, though. The Expert is also equipped with an auxiliary Silicon Image 3114 SATA controller that supports up to four additional devices. Unfortunately, the SiI 3114 rides the PCI bus, so it'll have to share limited bandwidth with other peripherals.

One of those peripherals will be Marvell's PCI-based 88E8001 Gigabit Ethernet controller. The 88E8001 is actually the Expert's secondary networking option, as the nForce4 SLI already has a Gigabit Ethernet MAC built right into the chip. The on-chip controller shouldn't be constrained by limited PCI bus bandwidth, and thanks to NVIDIA's ActiveArmor offload engine, its CPU utilization should be lower than competing solutions. However, NVIDIA has had to scale back ActiveArmor's effectiveness to address data corruption issues with the nForce4 chipset family, so its impact may be more muted than we've seen in the past.

Despite impressive storage and networking capabilities, the nForce4 SLI falls flat in the audio department. The chip eschews high definition in favor of a basic AC'97 audio implementation, which DFI predictably pairs with a Realtek codec. I wouldn't get too worked up about a lack of high definition audio, though. We've yet to encounter a chipset-level high definition audio implementation that supports DVD-Audio playback, and there are precious few other sources for high-def content.