DFI LANParty Venus nF4 SLI-DR Expert Motherboard

Introduction

LANParty Venus nF4 SLI-DR Expert is a limited edition motherboard from DFI. It is so exclusive that DFI is selling it inside a big jewelry box. Targeted to socket 939 CPUs and based on NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI, it is a high-end motherboard full of extra features. Let’s take a look at it.

On Figures 1, 2 and 3 you can see its “jewelry box”. Pay attention to the funny “Made Only in Taiwan” seal in Figure 1. In other words, we think that what they are trying to say is “hey, this isn’t a xing-ling motherboard made in China”. But officially saying that wouldn’t be politically right…

Figure 1: DFI Venus nF4 SLI-DR Expert motherboard box.

Figure 2: DFI Venus nF4 SLI-DR Expert motherboard box.

Figure 3: DFI Venus nF4 SLI-DR Expert motherboard box, opened.

As we mentioned, it is based on nForce 4 SLI, so it has two x16 PCI Express slots supporting NVIDIA’s SLI technology. It also has one x1 PCI Express slot, one x4 PCI Express slot (this is the first time we saw this kind of slot on a motherboard targeted to end-users) and three PCI slots.

A very important feature of this motherboard is its capacitors: all Japanese and all aluminum, as you can see in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Detail of DFI Venus nF4 SLI-DR Expert motherboard. Pay attention to its capacitors.

It has two Gigabit LAN ports, one controlled by the chipset together with Vitesse VSC8201 chip, which makes the physical layer interface, and another controlled by Marvell 88E8001 chip. In Figure 4, you can see these two chips on the left-hand side (the third chip there is the Super I/O chip, from ITE).