Throw Back Thursday: DFI LanParty NF2 Ultra rev B

In 2003 the Athlon processor was the enthusiast platform to have.  Not only was it faster than the Pentium III but had plenty of ways to be overclocked and was quite a bit cheaper.  Of course there are downsides to most things and the AMD chipset wasn’t very good and if you installed the heatsink incorrectly you would most often crack the core. 

For those that don’t remember this was the time when “flip chips” were popular placing the CPU core on top of the package and before the introduction of IHS, or the integrated heat spreader.

The old 462 Socket A didn’t get worldwide attention until the release of the Nvidia nForce 2 chipset which not only supported dual channel DDR 400 memory but was able to unlock the Athlon multiplier even after the traces were cut on the processor.  To do this you inserted a wire into the CPU socket before installing the processor and free multipliers for everyone.

One of the most popular motherboards of the time was the DFI LanParty NF2 Ultra which gave rise to the special Oskar Wu version the DFI LanParty NF2 Ultra Rev B pictured here.  It had everything from enhanced DDR memory support to an offset socket location for better cooling and an extra open area to support dual slot AGP cards.

The motherboard also supported SATA RAID and had onboard power and reset buttons for test bench use and LanParty style debugging.  Sadly the capacitors have started to burst which is also why Japanese capacitors became so popular some years later.