My Socket A and 754 DFI's have never been solid "Out Of The Box" for me... They have all needed at least a gentle touch, to get them so... RAM has been a bugger with some of them, BIOS another one that can be a cause, as it proved to be with my LP250GBUT
The NF7 and NF7S however, were spot-on from day 1
Give them their due however... Once the DFI have had their little tantrums for me, I have to say that I cannot fault them at all, not for anything.
I currently dont have any Socket A DFIs so I cannot say too much about them, but when I sold off a good clocking system a while back, it was a toss-up between the NF7S and the DFI, and the DFI was the one I let go, so I think that accounts for somethign in that for me, I found the NF7S was that little bit better.
All round anyway... They both clocked stupidly high, the DFI a tad more so, but the SoundStorm did it for me as its a nice smooth sound with my speakers.
Either way, you cannot go wrong with any of them, and the ammount of different BIOSes out there for them is quite surprising, so they are both very well supported by the OCC.