Now that we unpacked the board, we can take a closer look and see what this mainboard has to offer. The SLI-DR is built around the NVIDIA nForce4 SLI chipset, breathing to life some of the most insane 3D gaming experience possible by allowing the use of two video cards that support the Scalable Link Interface (SLI) features. SLI is an exclusive feature found only with NVIDIA motherboards supporting SLI and exclusive to SLI ready graphics cards.

This mainboard is a very colorful one, just like all the LANParty products, these are UV sensitive. What we see above is a full range of bus sockets comprised of 2 x PCI slots, 2 x 16x PCI-Express slots and in between those PCI-Express slots is the SLI/ Single VGA select, or configuration jumpers which allow you to select a single or dual card configuration.

A full pack of I/O connections are provided which will provide you the opportunity to connect almost anything you can throw at it. Yeps and it includes again the Dual Gigabit PCI and PCI-Express LAN, 8 USB 2.0 compliant ports, 1394 IEEE Firewire port, keyboard/mouse support and the S/PDIF-in and S/PDIF-out connectors.

Above you can see the nF4 chipset active cooler and the socket 939 which is flanked by a colorful blend of UV reactive slots and connectors. This board supports the AMD Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64 and Sempron series processor. The pictures below show another angle of the nForce 4 SLI and its active cooler which is very close to the PCI-Express slots needed for the latest generation video cards.

The VIA Fire VT6307 IIM 1394 Host Controller can be seen on the left and is the IEEE 1394 high-speed serial bus interface known as Firewire. The Marvel Yukon 88E8001 32-Bit Gigabit Ethernet Controller can be seen in the middle, this is the chipset that will control the ethernet GigaBit LAN functions. The ITE IT8712F-A provides the most commonly used legacy Super I/O functionality plus the latest environment control initiatives, such as H/W Monitor, Fan Speed Controller, SmartGuardian function and provides the board with floppy, keyboard, gameports and a host of other mother-board functionality.

The nF4 SLI-DR is loaded with SATA connectors, you will have a total of 8 SATA connectors comprised of 2 SATA controllers using 4 channels each. Between the SATA connectors we see the CMOS comes loaded from the factory with either Winbond or SST EEPROM which holds the BIOS image of the nF4 SLI-DR. We can also get a glimpse of the Silicon Image SiL3114 SATA controller and the EZ Touch EZ On power and reset buttons.

DFI used one other color (orange) on the LANParty nF4 SLI-DR mainboard, which is to identify the memory slots. In total there are 4 memory slots available. These slots can be filled with the more popular types of DDR ranging from DDR266, DDR333, DDR400 and beyond. The three silver heat sinks in the upper left picture, cool the three MOSFET power controllers that regulate the power output to the mother-board.

Turning the board around we can spot that the CPU back-plate that provides additional support. This back-plate prevents flexing and warping do to heavier and much more powerful heat sink fan CPU coolers needed to keep this board sufficiently cooled.

The DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR incorporates six jumper pin groups that configure the board for single card or dual card SLI usage. Included with the SLI-DR are a set of jumper pin pliers that allow you to easily remove the jumper caps. Again this is also known as the SLI/Single VGA select.