Mai reference board. I think there is a translation issue here. What is being sold is EXACTLY a Mai reference board, afaik. What a REFERENCE BOARD means is that it is produced exactly to the OEM REFERENCE DESIGN. My GeForce4Ti by Chaintech is a REFERENCE nVidia GeForce4Ti board, because Chaintech made no modifications of their own to the nVidia design before they manufactured it. They simply manufacture copies of nVidia's base design. It is sold as a Chaintech, because they manufactured it, but it is still properly referred to as an nVidia reference board.
On a motherboard context, there was an interview with NVIDIA PR on what degree does the motherboard manufactures follows the reference nForce2 class motherboards i.e. they stated that LeadTek would be the closest while ASUS was the opposite. They could base their designs on the reference design but they may substitute some of surrounding components towards the cheaper end e.g. Chaintech’s nForce2 has the worst AC97 DACs.
On the NVIDIA GeForce FX (e.g. 5800/Ultra, 5900/Ultra and 5950) front, the manufacturing of those GFX cards are tighter than the nForce2 motherboards. There could be some variance in relation to cooling solutions and the quality of memory installed.
