Ok, so I bought the DFI Lanparty nF3 UT 250GB. Once I got it up and going I love it as it stands at the moment but I wanted some input on some stuff.
Minor annoyance: The Soldering Job
While the soldering itself is good some of the contacts for the many components stretch for over an eighth of an inch beyond the back of the board. Some of these are long enough that when I first put the board in it was coming in contact with the tray. I'm a little hesitant to clip these as it wasn't me who did the soldering.
Moderate annoyance: Raid drivers/setup
I've setup a lot of raid arrays, striping, mirroring etc. but I've never had the problems I had with this board. I have to 120GB Seagate 7200.7 SATA drives and they were in an array before I tried to set this one up. I went in and enabled RAID, enabled these drives for raid, went into the raid bios and set them up in there and got them prepped but EVERY time the system tries to load the nV IDE drivers the whole system lock. On windows setup it locked up at Starting Windows every time. If I chose to only load the RAID driver and not the controller it wouldn't lock up but it wouldn't show a raid drive to format either. So I figured, screw it, I can live without raid and put my cache file on a seperate drive and do a bit of organizing. Its still fast. I got into windows, loaded the drivers from CD including the disk controller drivers and as soon as I reboot it locks up before during loading, restarts and I take "last known good." Then I reinstalled the drivers but left out the controller drivers as there were no problems with that particular hardware the way Windows had it configured. Right now I have no conflicts. The system is running superbly but I wish I knew why it did this and I can't get anything out of DFI at the moment as far as suggestions or help.
Mild dislike: No SPDIF digital adatper/module
The board has a set of jumpers to plug in an SPDIF digital module but I have yet to see or just don't know where to look for a compatible digital SPDIF module. I have one left over from my Albatron K8X800 Pro II but I don't believe it is compatible. I know a lot of people don't like onboard sound and I didn't used to but its a lot better than it used to be 4+ years ago. I wouldn't mind putting in another sound solution so long as it had a digital SPDIF. Buying the Audigy 2 ZS Platinum is a waste in my opinion and their proprietary creative digital SPDIF connections turn me off. So, I guess what I want to know is where do I find a digital SPDIF module or where do I get a real good sound card with digital SPDIF out?
Edit:
I forgot my system specs
Fortron 550W
AMD Athlon 64 3400+ CH
Mushkin 1GB Level One 3500+
DFI Lanparty nF3 UT 250GB
Asus AX800Pro/TVD
Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 120GB SATA x2 (on SATA 3 & 4)
WD 60 GB (Master on Secondary IDE)
LS120 (Slave on Secondary IDE)
NUTech DDW-082 DVD writer (Master on Primary IDE)
Sony 42x CDRW (Slave on Primary IDE)
Minor annoyance: The Soldering Job
While the soldering itself is good some of the contacts for the many components stretch for over an eighth of an inch beyond the back of the board. Some of these are long enough that when I first put the board in it was coming in contact with the tray. I'm a little hesitant to clip these as it wasn't me who did the soldering.
Moderate annoyance: Raid drivers/setup
I've setup a lot of raid arrays, striping, mirroring etc. but I've never had the problems I had with this board. I have to 120GB Seagate 7200.7 SATA drives and they were in an array before I tried to set this one up. I went in and enabled RAID, enabled these drives for raid, went into the raid bios and set them up in there and got them prepped but EVERY time the system tries to load the nV IDE drivers the whole system lock. On windows setup it locked up at Starting Windows every time. If I chose to only load the RAID driver and not the controller it wouldn't lock up but it wouldn't show a raid drive to format either. So I figured, screw it, I can live without raid and put my cache file on a seperate drive and do a bit of organizing. Its still fast. I got into windows, loaded the drivers from CD including the disk controller drivers and as soon as I reboot it locks up before during loading, restarts and I take "last known good." Then I reinstalled the drivers but left out the controller drivers as there were no problems with that particular hardware the way Windows had it configured. Right now I have no conflicts. The system is running superbly but I wish I knew why it did this and I can't get anything out of DFI at the moment as far as suggestions or help.
Mild dislike: No SPDIF digital adatper/module
The board has a set of jumpers to plug in an SPDIF digital module but I have yet to see or just don't know where to look for a compatible digital SPDIF module. I have one left over from my Albatron K8X800 Pro II but I don't believe it is compatible. I know a lot of people don't like onboard sound and I didn't used to but its a lot better than it used to be 4+ years ago. I wouldn't mind putting in another sound solution so long as it had a digital SPDIF. Buying the Audigy 2 ZS Platinum is a waste in my opinion and their proprietary creative digital SPDIF connections turn me off. So, I guess what I want to know is where do I find a digital SPDIF module or where do I get a real good sound card with digital SPDIF out?
Edit:
I forgot my system specs
Fortron 550W
AMD Athlon 64 3400+ CH
Mushkin 1GB Level One 3500+
DFI Lanparty nF3 UT 250GB
Asus AX800Pro/TVD
Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 120GB SATA x2 (on SATA 3 & 4)
WD 60 GB (Master on Secondary IDE)
LS120 (Slave on Secondary IDE)
NUTech DDW-082 DVD writer (Master on Primary IDE)
Sony 42x CDRW (Slave on Primary IDE)