Thursday, December 20, 2001

Introduction

The DFI NT70-SA is, in many ways, a replica of the TH7-II RAID motherboard from Abit. Much like the Abit board, the NT70-SA comes with an on-board RAID controller: the Promise Technologies PDC20265R, as opposed to the former's Highpoint HPT370. The NT70-SA also sports an Intel 82562ET network controller - much like the Abit board. In short, the DFI's newest offering seems destined to be measured against the Abit TH7-II, a comparison we'll undertake with relish, as we put the NT70-SA through the paces.

So, without further ado, let's head in to the review.

Characteristics

In terms of their relative specifications, the DFI NT70-SA and the Abit TH7-II RAID are practically indistinguishable. We would have to admit a modest advantage to the NT70-SA however, as it does come with 1 more USB connector than is present on its competitor.

Configuration

Configuration of the DFI NT70-SA is very simple.

For all intents and purposes, there are no Overclocking features present on this board - either in the BIOS, or in the form of on-board jumpers.

Simply put, that means no options for altering the FSB frequency, the Vio or Vcore voltages, or even memory timing options.

On this point at least, the DFI NT70-SA is much weaker than the Abit TH7-II RAID, which very nearly bubbles-over with Overclocking functionality.

The only noteworthy Overclocking function that we could find on the NT70-SA was an option for changing the clock multiplier setting. This came as little consolation however, as most Intel CPUs come equipped with an internal multiplier lock that would render this feature ineffective. So for all intents and purposes, the NT70-SA has no Overclocking abilities to speak of.

We should mention by the way, that it is quite possible that the final retail version of this board will be quite a bit different that the unit we received for testing.

Next: Technical details