DFI - DFI LAN Party NFII Ultra B Review

In the last system board review I took a look a the DFI LAN Party 875 board. It worked out fairly well for HTPC use especially if you are going to use it as a media sever thanks to it’s plentiful storage options and other special features. But if there was ever one system board that was truly meant for HTPC use I have now seen it. The DFI LAN Party NFORCE II Ultra B system board offers enough features to keep most HTPC users happy and also is a great board to start with if you are building a HTPC for the first time. Be warned though, once you experience some of the features on this board you may get spoiled by them.

…The system board was great and the features were awesome. The performance was great as well as I was able to unexpectedly play 1080i WMV HD content. The Dolby Digital encoding is an awesome feature that really was handy. I was really happy to see a last minute save by Nvidia with new drivers. I’m sure that if I hadn’t looked at the CPU utilization of this sound system I would have never noticed and carried on with my happy life with no problems. While the processor usage wasn’t incredibly high it was at a disappointing number with the older drivers. Thanks to the new driver revision the numbers are much more acceptable.

…I still feel that this kit would benefit from an updated package. Getting rid of the FrontX connections and including a fan controller, memory card reader or similar device would have been a better choice. The price of this board is a little higher than many similar boards but that may be due to the included extras and the addition off the gigabit NIC. The average price difference though between this board and similar ones was greater than the price difference between the 875 version and similarly priced boards.

DFI Lan Party NFORCE II Ultra B Review @ HTPCNews