I have this board in one of my retro PCs, with Athlon64 4000+ and GF7600 GPU. RAMs are 2 sticks of DDR400 plugged into the orange slots. The PSU I'm using is 530W with 26A on 5V rail and 27A on 3.3V, works without problem. I have the HDD Molex connector plugged in to the motherboard, with the FDD connector left unconnected. Have you tried hooking up the speaker to see if there are any beep codes?

jondoom wrote on 2020-07-08, 16:42:

Hello all, I discovered this forum and it seemed like the right place to go for retro help.

I just picked up a DFI Lanparty NF4 Ultra-D motherboard along with an Athlon 64 3000+ ( I ordered an Opteron 170 but I don't have it yet). As soon as it came in the mail, I set everything up. I have supertalent ddr and I also have some dell branded corsair stuff. All built up in the case, I first tried using an Antec 380w 80+ bronze PSU unit. I get the amber power indicator on the bottom of the board, but no power upon pressing my power button or the motherboards built in power button. I pulled the board out of the case, set it up on a box and progressed. I switched out the CMOS battery and also cleared the CMOS for a few minutes and tried again. No dice. I tried switching ram, no dice. I tried one ram stick at a time in each slot, no dice. I tried a newer 500w PSU, no dice. I notice this board has 4 power connectors on it. a Floppy "iceberg" connector right under the CPU socket, a 4 pin molex near the chipset fan, and then the usual 24 and 4 pin connectors. Does anyone who used this board back in the day remember how many amps the power supply needs on the 5v rail? At this stage I can only think the board is dead, the power supplies I'm trying to use are too modern, the ram that I do have isn't compatible with the board, or (pending trying the Opteron) the CPU is dead.

Per the manual, I've checked the jumpers. I notice the speaker jumper isn't on my motherboard, but I'm not sure if that would prevent power. I have an older Thermaltake 20 pin 430w power supply that worked fine on a socket 754 machine with a Gigabyte board, is it worth trying this ? It doesn't have a PCI-E cable, but that doesn't matter as I'd just end up using something like a 750ti without a power plug

I have a Lanparty NF4 in my WinXP retro build and I can tell you the following:

You can use any modern PSU with this motherboard, since the CPU rails are on the 4 pin ATX 12V connector (just like on a modern system).
This board can be picky with lower tier Athlons. I wasn't able to get my 3000+ to boot, but my 3200+ worked just fine.
That jumper you mentioned switches between the built-in speaker and the external speaker header. If your jumper is missing, you will never be able to hear it beeping (you have to put a jumper there).
The extra power connectors on the mainboard (apart from the 24+4 pin) are used to deliver additional power for the PCI express slots.

Thanks for the responses guys. I tried two different modern PSU's as mentioned before. I did originally have the case speaker hooked up to the board. The issue is, with the power supply on, the amber power light comes on, but that's literally it. Pressing the power button on the motherboard when it's on a cardboard box or using the cases power button when I had it in the case led to no response. No beeping, no fans spinning, nothing. I'm going to try even more ram, but if a modern PSU works, I'd imagine 380w is enough for a 750 and this board with 3gb of ram over the four slots. Perhaps it's worth cleaning the entire board with 99% alcohol? There are no bad caps from what I can tell. The seller had it in it's original box and it doesn't even look like he used the i/o shield.

Once my Opteron comes in the mail, I can see if the processor is the issue. I have used two different CPU coolers as well, but I can't see that causing absolutely no power response. I don't feel that the motherboard is "dead," because why would I even get the amber light?

If the board can't even start boot up sequence, that's probably something dead in VRM area. Or short circuit with your PSUs.

I may try spraying down the entire board in either 99% alcohol or electronics cleaner and see if that makes any difference. It's hard to believe the board can just die naturally without the previous owner doing something wild with it. I reached out to him and he did say it was incredibly picky with ram, but he used a generic superflower power supply when he used it without issue. I really want to keep playing with it because this is the ideal socket 939 board. All suggestions are welcome, even what might need to be recapped if caps are causing this issue.

My alternative would be to find an Abit board if I absolutely can't get this functioning.

Did you check the caps on the mainboard? My DFI NF4 Expert has one bulging cap and it still works OK, but you may want to check yours.

All of my caps look good upon inspection. A lot of what I've read says people have RAM issues with this board. I'm debating taking a chance on some g.skill or geil ddr as a last resort.

I had one which had the top PCIe x16 slot die. So try jumpering for x8+x8 mode and see what happens with the video card in the lower slot. Or try PCI video.

So try jumpering for x8+x8 mode

That won't help at all on a board, which refuse to even start.

Oh yeah I thought it just wasn't POSTing.

Yeah, my problem isn't as simple as not posting. It won't even power on even though the motherboard clearly is getting power.

Looks like a short somewhere on the motherboard preventing the PSU from starting. If you have a multimeter, could measure all the voltage rails against ground to look for short, especially the 12V 4pin CPU connector.

Is there a chance a bad bios chip could cause this problem? I can order a bios off the evil auction website for around 15$ USD. Not money well spent if a bios won't make a difference.

It's unlikely to be bios problem since you don't even have the fan spinning. There is no power supplied to the board, which would be the case if there is a short and the PSU protection circuit kicks in and shut itself down. Either that or the PSU is overloaded.

Here are photos of the board in question focusing on the caps as well as a photo of the LED

Apologies if it’s too big of photos. Mods can remove them. I may try putting all the caps under a heat gun for a minute or two and see if that’s the issue. Other than that all I can do is wait for the Opteron to rule out the cpu being dead.

Well guys, I picked up a Chaintech board and am having it shipped.. I'll let you know how it goes. I may replace every cap on this DFI board and see if that makes a difference since I do think it's dead.