DESPITE THE FACT that NVIDIA released its nForce4 SLI X16 chipset months ago, the original nForce4 SLI is still alive and well. In fact, some motherboard manufacturers have passed over the X16 in favor of new designs that use the plain old nForce4 SLI. That's an understandable strategy given the nForce4 SLI's rough feature parity with its successor, whose extra PCI Express lanes convey few real-world performance benefits.

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.