Most people know that the original nForce motherboard were pretty disappointing after all the hype had been generated about them. With that said nVidia did a great job with the nForce 2 motherboards I can say after reading many reviews so I am looking forward to this review. Abit has long been a very high quality manufacturer of motherboards and video cards and this motherboard should be no different. This motherboard is the NF7-S rev 2.0 which is the newest revision, revision 2.0 features the new crush 18D nvidia chipset which should allow for better overclocking a a few new features. The specifications below are taken from the Abit website.
Processor
– Supports AMD-K7 Duron™/Athlon™/Athlon™ XP Socket A with 200/266/333MHz FSB Processors
Chipset
– NVIDIA nForce2 SPP chipset with MCP2-T
– Supports Advanced Configuration and Power Management Interface (ACPI)
– Accelerated Graphics Port connector supports AGP 8X/4X (0.8V/1.5V)
Memory
– Three 184-pin DIMM sockets
– Supports 3 DIMM DDR 200/266/333 (Max. 3GB)
– Supports 2 DIMM DDR 400 (Max. 2GB)
Serial ATA
– On board Serial ATA PCI Controller
– Supports SATA data transfer rates 150MB/s (1.5G bps)
Audio
– 6-Channel AC 97 CODEC on board
– Professional digital audio interface supports 24-bit S/PDIF Out
– Supports real time AC-3 Encode by Soundstorm™ Technology
System BIOS
– SoftMenu™ Technology
– Award Plug and Play BIOS
LAN
– On board 10/100Mb LAN Physical layer interface
– 10/100Mb Operation supports ACPI & Wake on LAN
IEEE 1394
– Supports IEEE 1394a at 100/200/400MB/s transfer rate
Internal I/O Connectors
– 1 x AGP8X/4X slot, 5 x PCI slots
– 1 x Floppy Port supports up to 2.88MB
– 2 x Ultra DMA 33/66/100/133 Connectors
– 2 x Serial ATA 150 Connectors
– 2 x USB headers, 2 x IEEE1394a header
– 2 x CD-IN, 1 x IrDA
Back Panel I/O
– 1 x PS/2 Keyboard, 1 x PS/2 mouse
– 2 x Serial, 1 x Parallel
– 1 x S/PDIF Out port
– Audio connectors (Front Speaker, Line-in, Mic-in, Center/Sub, Surround Speaker)
– 2 x USB, 1 x RJ-45 LAN Connector
Miscellaneous
– ATX form factor
– Hardware monitoring – Including Fan speeds, Voltages, System environment temperature
As you can see this motherboard has some pretty impressive specifications however there is more to this board than just specs. There are a few other features I wanted to look at in more detail before we move on. The first is Abit’s CPU H.T.P. (Hardware Thermal Protection) this feature will prevent your CPU from overheating and being destroyed by using hardware detection rather than software. One of the coolest overclocking features this motherboard has is 5 Bit Frequency ID which basically allows you to unlock your CPU without unlocking it physically. Below is a quote from Abit on their 5 Bit Frequency ID.
“By ABIT 5-bit FID Override technology, users can get variety of CPU over-clocking sets. For example, if user gets a AMD Athlon XP 2400+ CPU by 133MHz (FSB)x15(Multiplier)= 2000MHz(CPU/DDR=133/166), that means user only can adjust the FSB to get an over-clocking performance without 5-bits FID override technology. Otherwise he can adjust the frequency through 5-bits FID override by 166MHz x12=2000MHz (CPU/DDR=166/166) or 100MHz x20=2000MHz (CPU/DDR=100/100)to gain a best performance platform.”
The Abit NF7-S rev.2 motherboard comes in a “normal” box which has the Abit logo on the front and a good amount of information on the back. There isn’t as much information on this box compared to a lot of other motherboard boxes but that doesn’t really matter because this board has a lot to offer.
This NF7-S rev.2 is a red/orange color which looks pretty nice, it is for sure a different color than I am used to seeing but it looks good I think. Just glancing at the top of the board I can see that is has a very good layout and that everything looks to be in the best place.
The I/O back panel is packed with a ton of useful connections; there are the standard PS/2, serial, and parallel ports but you a lot more. There are 5 RCA mini jacks (Front Speaker, Line-in, Mic-in, Center/Sub, Surround Speaker) which can be used for 5.1 sound and a S/PDIF Out port. There are also 2 USB 2.0 ports and a RJ-45 LAN Connector to eliminate the need for a NIC which is really nice. If this motherboard had the onboard video it would be in place of one of the serial ports however it does not so there are 2 serial ports.
This motherboard comes with tons of extras so that you can take advantage of just about every feature on it. The board comes with an IDE, floppy, and SATA cable, IDE to SATA converter, and power converter for the SATA converter. I really like that the SATA converter was included so that if you are not using SATA you could have another IDE channel. Along with those things you also get a USB and firewire header to give you 2 more of each and a I/O panel for your case so that the motherboard will line up correctly.
The manuals that come with this motherboard are overall pretty good, however one thing that I didn’t like was that the language sections weren’t broken up very well and the English section was buried in the middle. The CD comes with a users manual, drivers, Acrobat reader, and a hardware monitor. The floppy disk has the drivers for the SATA controller.
The northbridge on this motherboard is covered by a heatsink fan which does a good job cooling the SPP chipset below it. The nVidia SPP chipset does not have the intergraded Geforce 4 MX built into it so this board does not have any onboard video. After taking off the heatsink I found a good amount of thermal compound on the core which I always like to see. I cleared away the compound so I could get a picture of the core and as you can see it is indeed a nForce 2 SPP.
Below the NF7-S sticker is the Silicon Image Sil3112 SATA controller which provides SATA control. Right next to the controller chip are the two SATA connections for your hard drives, or you can use a converter to change them to IDE which will be looked at later. Along with the SATA in the picture you can also see two extra USB 2.0 headers, CMOS battery, BIOS, and jumpers for your LEDs and case switches. Right above the BIOS are the two IDE connections for your hard drives and optical drives.The southbridge of this motherboard is the nVidia nForce 2 MCP-T chipset which controls a lot of the PCI, IDE, and other I/O aspects.
This board comes with a firewire header which you can hook up to the headers right below the AGP slot. Also in the picture is the ALC650 Audio Codec which is the chip with the little crab on it and just to the right of that chip is the Realtek RTL8201BL 10/100Mbps which controls the onboard LAN.
There is a 4 pin connection for the 12v connection from your power supply to give you more power to keep you stable while overclocking which is really nice to see. Right above the power connection is the Attansic ATXP1 chip which is the jumper free over clocking controller, it provides many of the BIOS features such as FID, Auto-recover, CPU Changing Detect, and a few other things.
The DDR slots are at the top right of the motherboard along with the floppy drive connector which is a little strange but it should work fine. To the right of the DDR slots is the Winbond W83627HF-AW I/O controller chip which takes care of the I/O stuff. This motherboard is able to use dual channel DDR which means you can use two sticks of RAM to increase the available bandwidth.
The socket has a good amount of space around it and the four mounting holes needed for waterblocks and some heatsinks. There should be no problem fitting on even the biggest heatsink because of the ample amount of room provided.
The BIOS is the standard AWARD layout and contains most of the same main sections as other motherboards do. The best part of this BIOS in my opinion is the Softmenu III section. Within this menu you can change your multiplier, FSB, FSB/DRAM ratio, voltages, and CPU overheat protection.
The standard CMOS features section of the BIOS is where you can set the time, IDE devices, and a few of the other things for your system. The Advanced BIOS Features section is where you can set the POST options and the boot order in which you want you computer to boot.
The Advanced Chipset Features section is where you can change your RAM and AGP settings. There are a ton of RAM settings to choose from such as row-active delay, ras-to-cas delay, row-precharge, CAS latency time, and a few others. There are also a good amount of AGP settings to choose from such as the data transfer rate, fast writes, aperture size, and a few others. The Integrated Perephials section is where you can enable, disable, or tweak the onboard devices such as sound, LAN, USB, serial, parallel, FDD, and IR. I really like that so much is able to be tweaked because it gives you a lot of flexability.
The power management setup section is where you can set your ACPI, wakeups, power on functions, and power loss restart options. The PnP/PCI configuration section is where you can set your IRQs and ESCD (Extended System Configuration Data) options, enabling this will prevent your system from having a conflict with the OS after installing new hardware.
The PC Health Status section of the BIOS is where you can set some safety options and check the status of temperatures, fan speeds, and voltages. The CPU warning temperature and CPU shutdown temperature are so that if your CPU gets too hot it will warn you and shut down your system before it is damaged. You can see your system and CPU from here before booting into your operating system to be sure they aren’t too high. You are also able to see your case fan speeds which are the 3 pin headers on the motherboard as well as the voltage of your system.
For all of the benchmarks I tested at 133, 166, 200, and 215 FSB to give a comparison. All of the memory settings were at the most aggressive settings and all of the resolutions were set to 640×480 to test the CPU rather than the video card. I will be using the following benchmarks: SiSoft Sandra 2004, 3DMark2001SE, Quake 3, Jedi Knight II, and Unreal Tournament 2003.
Test Bed
- Abit NF7-S Rev 2.0
- 1800+ Thoroughbred
- 60GB Seagate Barracuda IV HDD
- 80GB Western Digital HDD
- 1024MB PC3200 Corsair TwinX (review to come)
- XFX GeForceFX 5600 Ultra
- Koolcase’s Panther
- Plextor 40x12x40 CDRW
- Plextor PX-504A DVD+RW (review to come)
- Globalwin Sapphire 520w PSU (review to come)
- Danger Den watercooling kit (review to come)
SiSoft Sandra 2004 professional was just released and allows you to test even more than before, as well as updating the comparisons. This program has a lot of different informational modules and benchmarking tools. The first benchmark I ran was the CPU benchmark which will output the MIPS and MFLOPS for your CPU. Below is a screen shot from each FSB speed, even though some of the FSB are higher the scores are lower. This is because the total CPU speed is lower on some due to the fact that when overclocking a lot changes. If the total CPU speed and FSB were higher each time the score would increase eachtime.
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133FSB
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166FSB
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200FSb
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215FSB
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Sandra can also benchmark the multimedia ability of your system. This benchmark will output the Integer aEMMX/aSSE and Floating-Point results from your system. Again the same situation holds true where the results vary between the FSB because of the CPUs overall speed. There is a definite improvement though with each one from the stock 133FSB.
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133FSB
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166FSB
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200FSb
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215FSB
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SiSoft is one of the most used benchmarks to see what kind of memory bandwidth your system is outputting. I used 1024MB (2×512) Corsair 3200LL which is one of their dual channel kits. All of the speeds were set to the fastest in the BIOS so that I would get the best performance possible. At 133FSB the Int Buffered score was 2039 and the Float Buffered score was 1922. After kicking the FSB to 166 you can see a huge boost in the score. The Int buffered was 2546 and the float buffered was 2361. I was able to get the RAM to 215 FSB which gave me a result of 2988/2699, as you can see the scores are almost off the charts.
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133FSB
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166FSB
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200FSb
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215FSB
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With 3DMark2001SE you can see a huge improvement in performance when going from 133 FSB to 166 FSB. From 166 to 200 there is 437 point increase then another 58 points gained when going to 215FSB. The score difference between 133 and 166 FSB is really impressive. After getting to 200 and 215 FSB the overall score is really good even at 640×480.
There is the same kind of large increase in performance with Jedi Knight II when going from 133 FSB to 166 FSB. Above 166FSB there is really no difference in frame rate, and would not be noticeable at all. You can truly see the difference while overclocking though.
With Quake 3 the increase is much less impressive when compared to 3DMark2001SE and Jedi Knight II. You can see the larger increase in frames per second when going from 133 to 166 FSB however it is not as good. After 166FSB the increase is not very large like the testing with Jedi Knight II.
Unreal Tournament 2003 does a flyby and botmatch test when the benchmark runs. Once again the improvement between 133 and 166 FSB is large like with the other testing. Once above 166 FSB the increase in frame rate is very low and would be unnoticeable if actually playing the game.
With the 5-bit FID Override technology and Abit’s Soft Menu III overclocking couldn’t be easier. There is no need to open up your case and mess with jumpers or DIP switches because all of the settings that you would ever want to change are in the BIOS.
The way I always overclock is to get the highest possible FSB while keeping my system stable and increasing the overall speed of my CPU in Mhz. The first thing I did was change the multiplier just to see if it would unlock and it did. I was able to change the multiplier up and down without a problem. The 5-bit FID Override technology is great and will save you a lot of time and effort from physically unlocking your CPU. After increasing the FSB slowly
I finally maxed out at 215MHz which is amazing. I love how I was able to change the CPU FSB/DRAM ratio and AGP frequency, if these options were not available the overclock would have been a lot lower because my RAM and video card would have maxed out. If I had lowered the speed of RAM I probably could have gotten more out of this board but then the RAM would have been running slower.
To achieve this overclock I had to increase the CPU core to 1.75v, the DDR voltage to 2.9v, and the chipset voltage to 1.7v. I have a watercooling kit from Danger Den which allowed me to overclock better by cooling the CPU which was running hotter than normal because of the higher voltage. I will have a review on the watercooling kit later, however if you do not have watercooling be careful while changing the voltage settings. Below is a screenshot of everything changed in the Soft Menu III section which resulted in this overclock.
Conclusion
This was my first real experience with an Abit motherboard and I couldn’t be happier with it. Not only does it have a ton of features such as USB 2.0, SATA, dual channel DDR, onboard LAN, firewire, and sound but it performs really well. The BIOS allows you to change the multiplier, FSB, CPU/DRAM ratio, AGP frequency, voltages, DRAM timings, and tons of other things that many other boards do not.
There was nothing that I could find wrong with the layout, BIOS, features, or anything at all. Overall I am going to give this motherboard a 10/10 and awarding it the OCmodshop Seal of Approval. I would like to thank Abit for sending me this motherboard to review.
Pros
- Incrediable overclocking ability
- 5-bit FID Override technology
- Tons of memory tweaking options
- Vcore up to 2.00v
- 6-Channel AC 97 CODEC
- Serial ATA capable of RAID
- Onboard LAN
- 6 USB 2.0 ports
- AGP 8x
- Onboard IEEE 1394a
- Lots of thermal compound on the northbridge
- SATA adapter and cable included
Cons
- None