Review Date: 9th June 2002 Reviewed By: Michael "Hughesey" Hughes Product: DFI NB70-SC Intel 845 Motherboard Rating: 88% Manufacturer: DFI Supplier: N/A

Features Up Close

Click to enlarge.

Size/Layout
As we can see, the board is of typical ATX size/layout. The PCB colour is the bog standard browny colour, obviously showing that DFI care about the quality of their products, not so much the looks.

Expansion
The expansion slots on the board are in the form of 1 * AGP, 5 * PCI and 1 * CNR. This combination is seen on many motherboards who aim at both OEM users (illustrated by the inclusion of the CNR slot), and power users. Personally, I believe that 5 PCI slots is more than ample expansion room.

Chipset
The northbridge on this motherboard is obviously the Intel845 chipset, which delivers the power and speed of the pentium 4 processor, and couples it with either DDR ram or SD-RAM. The introduction of this chipset came after Intel released its Pentium 4's based on the i850 chipset, which only allowed RD-RAM. However, since the market was already filled with DDR and SD-RAM, it was a wise decision by intel to support these memory specifications.

The Intel® 82801BA I/O Controller Hub 2 (ICH2) is in charge of the i/o on this board, and it provides us with 4 USB 1.1 ports, AC97 sound, 2 ATA100 IDE ports, ACPI features (see specs), and also onboard 10/100 LAN (which DFI have chosen to leave off their board).

CPU Socket
As we can see above, the P4 socket is pretty much standard. The area surrounding the socket is filled with capacitors and the northbridge heatsink/clip, however, there is still enough room to attach cutom mounting brackets found on coolers such as the "Below-0 Panther" heatsink.

Rear Ports
Here we can see the standard rear-port configuration, comprising of the PS2 Keyboard/Mouse connectors, 2 x USB connectors, the parallel and serial connectors, then the sound / gameport connectors.