ALiveNF4G-DVI is the first AM2 board based on the proven 6100+410 chipset pair that first appeared on the Socket 939 board 939NF4G-SATA2. This entry level board may be more expensive than the single chip solution NF6100-405, its PCIe x16 slot support already wins. Moreover, the two chipset are only warm to touch which is excellent for prolong usage. In fact, the integrated graphics performance is also better than the single chipset.

Just like the other AM2 boards reviewed before, this board supports dual channel DDRII-800/667/533 with 4 DIMM slots with a max capacity of 8GB.The board also supports 2 SATA II 3.0Gb/s supporting RAID 0,1, JBOD, NCQ and hot plug functions. There is Fast ethernet, a 7.1 ch VISTA premium level HD Audio using the ALC888 audio codec. There is 1 PCIe x16 for external VGA card. The board is Windows^® Vista™ Permium Logo Hardware Ready.

In terms of overclocking, the board has the basic options like voltage for dimm and cpu, cpu freq range of up to 300MHz and a up to 25x multiplier option. There are options to lock PCI and PCIe too. For overclocking options, please see Gallery for BIOS options. In our overclocking test, we set the HT multiplier to 4x (800MHz) and set the CPU multiplier to 10x, CPU Vcore to 1.4v and push the CPU CLK to 293MHz and it was quite stable for the AM2 4000+ 2GHz -> 2.93GHz on air. We tried to lower the multiplier to 6x and wanted to push for higher HTT. No matter what I do, it just couldn't POST. It seems that the BIOS might have a block on > 300.

Overall, the board works well with both integrated and external graphics card. You can also do a multi monitor with 2 displays. You can choose to use VGA or DVI as the output. Although the chipset supports Purevideo, it does not provide the full range of features like the NF6150 and high end graphics cards. eSATA which is a good feature is also missing from this board. This board is a probably a good board for a HTPC for watching DVD. If you intend to do proper HD decoding, you can consider pairing it up with a graphics card that supports H.264 decoding.

Pricing (US)

Pricing (UK)

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Pros

• Hot Plug SATA
• SATA II RAID
• 7.1 HD audio
• VISTA Premium Hardware Ready

• AMD Live! Ready

• Dual Graphics VGA: DVI-D and D-Sub ports

Cons

• No eSATA
• No 1394
• No GbE

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10.