DFI Lanparty UT 250BG Good Bad and the ugly

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v_lestat

Gawd
Joined
Sep 13, 2004
Messages
718
Ok gentlemen, i want one of these boards but before i do PLEASE inform me of what to expect.

as with any motherboard there are those whom have had nothing but bad experoences with them but i see more good than bad,. so im wondering or more so asking.

let me have it.
give me the good bad and the ugly of what i should expect.

i can get a brand new one uber cheap but i wont spend the money if its gunna be nothing but issues. so..

let me have it.
 
I have had great luck with mine. If you are going to overclock, this is the board to get. My 3400+ mobile can hit 2.6 Ghz.
 
As a contrast, I'm not an OC'er so here's why I picked this board:

Featureset. I wanted as many onboard sATA headers as possible. At the time I was looking, I had 2 choices. the MSI K8n Neo Platinum and the DFI offering.

Reliability. I was leaning towards the MSI because of their rep. To be honest, I have been an Asus fan for years and always bought Asus, but I felt that their 754 offering at the time was weak and the MSI was the frontrunner.

However, I was looking at memory and noticed that many manufacturers would not rate their PC3200 memory at Cas2 for AMD boards. I went to MSI forums and found many complaints of this, I checked Corsair forums and got the same vibe. The MSI board had some memory shortcomings (at least in my book).

Checking on the MSI forums their sATA headers were not locked properly, so any OC that went past a certain point was going to cause corruption on 2 of the headers. I wasnt considering OCing, but that point stuck in my mind as a detail that should have been looked at.

The DFI offering has an awesome featureset, the BIOS is tweaked to allow my double-sided memory to work at cas2 (2-2-2-5) @ pc3200 _out of the box_. The MSI board has difficulty with that according to many of their forum readers. I was not willing to "wait for the bios update to see if that fixes anything" attitude of the MSI support staff.

I couldnt be happier with this board. It was the little things that made it for me. The features, the board layout, the stability and the cost. At the time, the DFI was ~ $15 less than MSI. Another little thing that blew my mind was the power and reset switches located on the mobo for testing. I didnt have to hook up the entire case to see if the damn thing would post. It was the little details that really blew my mind.

There are bad things, but very minor.

They include rounded IDE and floppy cables. They are the cheapest POS rounded cables I have ever laid eyes on. They only included 2 sATA cables. The manual is on CD. the printed manual covers installation and basic software only. Their bios menu has more options than you can shake a dimm at, but only available with a GUI.

Good details: The cables are UV reactive, as well as the PCI/AGP, heatsink mount, sata headers, etc. Very apealing to the eye. They include a molex-to-sATA power connector if you forget to buy a PSU with sATA power connectors.

I love mine. I'm not going to stress it like 90% of the board readers here will, but I think its a great s754 solution. Its not 100% perfect, but its friggin close in my book.
 
thanks for the info guys

my reason for getting this was to replace a major piece of crap Chaintech VNF3-250
the aGP slot is plagued with the same problems other VNF owners see VERY lackluster graphics performance.

the overclocking is VERY limited but im quite sure thats because of the corsair value crap ram i have in it.

even with a 3200+ CG clawhammer it still wont overclock past 212 stable at DDR200 if i drop it to 166 it goes a little higher but of course im loosing speed not gaining.


overall, its an ok board but the agp problems have caused it to be worthless to me.

so i am taking the board in my signature and putting it in that system, and putting the DFI in my rig, as my main system

current the K8N-E Deluxe runs 2 setting just fine. 10x multi and 250mhz fsb at 1.60vcore and 2.7vdimm
OR
9x Multi 260mhz FSB 1.60 vcore and 2.7v vdimm

both equal 2.5ghz the limit of this chip
but the real kicker of this motherboard as many of you know, the board only goes to 2.7vdimm MAX!!! which as ive stated many time here and other places, is the reason why ASUS still remains at the bottom of my list, ive had nothing but bad motherboards from them in the past, even RMA boards were DOA or bad. but for them to make a board like this that is otherwise 100% stable and only put 2.7vdimm well thats retarded

i went and got an OCZ DDR Booster but the damn thing wont fit cuz there is a capacitor in front of dimm 0 that hits it. just like most nforce 3 boards.

so the DFI is mine i purchased it a few hours ago. brand new not rebuilt, unused $100
checking around i found that to be a damn good deal, especialy when the going rate on ebay is well over $125.

i hope its as good as i hear it is. i look forward to really pushing my system further than i have before.

not to mention that the DFI will hold the ddr booster in slot 0 allowing me to use my other 2 slots to fill with my PC4000.

so let the comments keep rolling
ESPCIALLY if there is anything i need to know, or anything i need to do when i install it.
i dont want to install it and have to battle with an odd setting or glitch cuz i need to update the bios or go to an older bios,, or even set some hidden setting in the bios.

speaking of bios,, does this board have the hidden bios like the MSI board does ??
 
v_lestat said:
speaking of bios,, does this board have the hidden bios like the MSI board does ??
Click to expand...
Yeah, there are a few of beta bios out there. I am using beta v4 - 10/15 which extends the memory voltage up to 4.0v. You can also run memtest from the bios without any boot device.
 
wow memtest from the bios see now thats cool

ive read some good things about the guy who designed this motherboard. guess it seems to be true.
 
anyone else ??

hey spin02 email that bios file please email is in my sig

or give me a link where i can download it at

and anything i should know about the bios ? bugs glitches anything.

and im serious fellas tell me what to expect even little odities i should keep my eye on,, there is one thing i dont need right now and thats aggrivation from more pc parts.
 
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