In the last months we were able to watch a real fight between the two top CPU manufacturers Intel and AMD. Every one of them invested a lot in order to come up with the greatest performance, reliability and usability. Personally I think that they also invested quite a lot in marketing, but from this point of view Intel is the master of magic. When the latest Pentium 4 2Ghz socket 478 reached the market a lot of websites presented reviews of the new king of the road. Almost all these articles were positive, even if the Pentium IV was criticized in the past for its inefficient per clock performance. When Athlon XP reached the market, we were able to sense a similar attitude, but at another level. AMD was not able to produce the same media effect as Intel. It's a pity that PC Hardware was not able to present you reviews of the new CPUs, but with all our efforts it was not possible. Today I will try to repair this and to present you the new Intel Pentium IV CPU from another perspective, at almost three months from its release. We will try it together with a new 845 based motherboard that allows overclocking. You can tell me that this will be more a review of the DFI NB72-SR and without any doubt it is, even the title states that, but it is also a review of the latest Intel Pentium IV CPU because it's the first time when it entered our lab. OK, let's see what we can tell about Pentium IV 478; amazing performance, good potential or dust in the eyes?

First look

The NB72-SR is shipped in a box with an user's manual, three IDE cables, one floppy disk cable, one RAID Driver and one drivers CD. The board we tested had RAID onboard and was revision B. As far as I know DFI has two versions of this board, the other one is called NB72-SC and doesn't have RAID onboard. The supplied manual had only one strong point: it's written in English, French, German, Spanish. It was neither better nor worse than other DFI manuals, but it surely didn't shine: no information about the CPU installation, motherboard physical installation or supported memory modules, just to name a few problems.

There are five PCI slots, one AMR, one AGP and three DIMM slots onboard, quite enough for most users. The AGP slot has the new retention mechanism which holds the AGP card. On the back of the CPU socket, on the reverse side of the board there is a metallic layer which seems to support the CPU cooler mounting mechanism. The metallic layer is quite large and I personally disagree with it because it may provide a propagation space for socket signals. Normally high frequency signals are not influenced by such factors, but we'll see about that.

There are three fan headers, two very close to the CPU and one near the motherboard's edge in the opposite corner. The ATX connector and the additional power supply headers are positioned very well, near the DIMM slots. Unfortunately you can not install the board in a small case because these connectors may make very hard the installation of 5.25" devices. The 845 chip is cooled by a large heatsink, with no additional fan on top. The thermal interface is assured by phase changing material. The RAID IDE connectors are placed in the traditional position, parallel with the PCI slots, next to the motherboard front edge. We really appreciated in the past the case headers design of older DFI motherboards, but NB72-SR uses the traditional design with pins perpendicular to the board's surface. A very important point in the board design is the fact that NB72-SR doesn't suffer from DIMM insertion problems even with the AGP card on place, because it has a five PCI slots configuration. On board you can also find an USB header which provides connectivity for two USB ports. Take care that DFI didn't supply a USB bracket. NB72-SR comes also with onboard audio, but I strongly suggest you to use a PCI card if you want real time audio encoding or decoding. For other applications a AC'97 sound should be OK.

DFI NB72-SR product picture

On the board there are a lot of jumpers, even if most of them do not have an active role in setup. I don't know if all the NB72-SR motherboards have the BIOS soldered on board, which makes problems in case of BIOS failures because you can not replace the BIOS chip.