Let's take a quick glance at what's inside this magnificent new motherboard box.

First off, the box is huge. It's probably the largest motherboard box I have ever seen. This thing measures 5 inches deep, 14.5 inches wide, and 15.25 inches tall. With this thing being that large, you know it just has to be packed full of geekin goodies. Let's see....

The packing list for this box is:

The DFI NFII Ultra Motherboard: What makes this any different from any other nForce2 motherboard? UV Sensitive PCI, AGP, DDR, IDE, and Floppy ports. Kickass!

A FrontX: This is a little unit that mounts in a 5 1/4 bay. It is a fully customizable port replicator. It comes with USB2 ports, a firewire port, and audio ports. If you don't want to use some of them, you don't have to put them on the FrontX.

PCTranspo: This is a PC Carrier strap. This makes it a ton easier to carry your rig to that next LAN party.

Rounded Cables: 2 x UV Reactive Green and round Dual IDE cables and 1 x matching floppy cable. Isn't it about time someone started putting rounded cables in their motherboard boxes? I think so.

Accessories: 1 x SATA cable and power converter, Motherboard backplate, S/PDIF panel, Game Port, and a Firewire plate.

Manuals and CD's: Drivers Disk, Raid drivers on a floppy, Users manual, Features book, and a DFI CD.

Architecture and Organization

The layout of a motherboard can be significantly imporatant to some people, and that's why I have chosen to talk about it here. Let's take a quick looksie shall we.

The first thing I wanted to mention is that the CMOS Bios Reset Jumper is located in an odd place. It's located underneath the bottom PCI slot. Not only is this completely wierd and at first a little difficult to find without reading the manual first, but it's also difficult to get too without having a pair of small needle-nose pliers on hand.

Next, the northbridge heatsink. It's a beautifully huge heatsink. It stands about an inch off of the motherboard. There's another heatsink on this board I feel is significant to mention. It's located to the right of the northbridge on a power diode. If you read Dwayne's review on the MSI motherboard, it was this same diode that was causing the board to fry. Well, it looks like DFI learned from MSI's mistake and slapped a little heatsink on it. Very cool.

Another new design idea that I like is onboard power and reset buttons. These are located just above the front power and reset connectors. These make it really easy to work with the board without having to tip it over and set it up and back and forth... ect... you get the point.

Another small downfall to this board is the lack of the four mounting holes around the CPU. Most other motherboards have them, and in a lot of cases, they are very necessary. For instance, if you wish to use a heavier heatsink on your CPU, such as a Swiftech Peltier, you can't. Heavy heatsinks require the usage of those holes, and here, there are none.