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Specifications
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CPU
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Chipset
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Front Side Bus
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Memory
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BIOS
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Power Management
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Hardware Monitor
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Audio
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LAN
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IDE
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Serial ATA with RAID
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IEEE 1394
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Rear Panel I/O Ports
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I/O Connectors
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Expansion Slots
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PCB
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The nForce 4 chipset provides 4 SATA ports natively through the MCP along with the two IDE channels. The DR model adds an additional 4 SATA ports through a Silicon Image Sil 3114 chip like the Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI that we took a look at earlier. Each of the SATA solutions have their own advantages - the SI chip allows for software RAID5 support which provides some of the advantages of both RAID0 and RAID1 in a three drive setup. Each nForce 4 native SATA port allows for 3Gb/s of bandwidth, double that of strictly SATA 1.0 implementations. RAID partitions on the nForce 3/4 MCP can also span across both the IDE and SATA controllers for some monster drive configurations.
Audio for the nF4 SLI-DR is provided through Realtek's ALC850 codec but the implementation is a little different on the nF4 lineup. A quick glance at the back panel for the board will reveal a large empty spot where the usual audio jacks are located. A lot of enthusiasts usually scoff at onboard audio because of electrical noise introduced by other components on the board. DFI's response is the ALC850 chip being moved onto its own PCB and has dubbed this arrangement Karajan audio. There is a coaxial in and out located on the back of the motherboard. Interestingly enough, there is a jumper that lets the end user toggle between the coaxial connection being handled by the NVIDIA MCP unit or through the ALC850 codec.
The nF4 lineup from DFI shares the same PCB so the second PCIe x16 slot is found on both the nF4 Ultra and the nF4 SLI. In fact, both boards even share the same BIOS despite the fact that there is the SI controller found on the SLI-DR that was not present on the Ultra-D. Unlike the hoops that have to be jumped through on the Ultra-D board to get SLI working, the infamous SLI bridge piece is included with the SLI board and no modding is needed to get SLI to function correctly on the DFI board.
tell me you would know where to find them?
thank you