Throwback Time: DFI LanParty NF2 Ultra B

Last week I posted a Socket A motherboard from Gigabyte and figured I would follow it up with might have been the BEST Socket A motherboard of the era. 

The DFI LanParty NF2 Ultra B.

During the reign of DFI they would often re-issue motherboards based on customer feedback.  The NF2 Ultra B was one of the first boards that Oskar Wu redesigned and turned out to be extremely popular with overclockers.  Some of the design revisions included moving the socket to the upper left of the motherboard and pushing the VRM closer to the chipset.  The idea here was to balance power delivery and put the CPU higher in the chassis for better cooling.  It even came with heatsink mounting holes so you could use larger heatsinks.

The board featured a very large North Bridge heatsink along with the normal flair of DFI LanParty features including onboard power and reset buttons, RAID controller and new CMOS Reloaded.

CMOS Reloaded has since become a stable in the industry allowing people to store overclocking profiles and quickly reload your settings in the event that you needed to reset the CMOS.  NForce motherboards also had a nasty "bug" which caused the CMOS to "brick" when overclocking and required that you either "hot flash" the BIOS or replace the BIOS chip.  Despite all the good DFI never did include a secondary BIOS on any of their motherboards however, any serious overclocker had a bag of them just for this reason.