 |
|
Abit
NF7-S - Up Close and Personal |
|
Under the Hood |
|
The
Bundle
When choosing a
mainboard, there are plenty of pros and cons to consider.
Do I need RAID support? IEEE 1394? USB 2.0?
Is there a good bundle? Although the bundled surprises
that can come with a mainboard purchase, will usually not
make or break our decision, it's always nice to see other
hardware in the box, besides the motherboard itself.
The NF7-S came with a nice bundle. The downfall to the
bundle was only supplying one ATA 133 ribbon cable. I
know most who are purchasing a motherboard usually have
extra ribbon cables hanging around or may have made the leap
to rounded cables, but it's always good to see at least two
ribbon cables, since multiple hard drives have become the
norm, especially with the ever increasing RAID popularity.
On a brighter
note, the NF7-S has some extra treasures inside to push that
ribbon cable right off the short term memory queue.
Inside you'll find a very well written manual, a
driver/utility CD that comes with Winbond Hardware Doctor,
Acrobat Reader, and the AWARD Flash program. Nothing
notable here except the hardware monitoring software, which
is rather nice.
Also in the box,
you'll find a USB 2.0 bracket to add two more USB ports to
the back of your system. The other bracket inside, is
the IEEE 1394 bracket, which has two Firewire ports to add
in. Moving along we find what we've been looking for.
Along with Dual DDR support, one of the hottest technologies
on the market that is waiting to take off, is the Serial ATA
( SATA ) interface for hard drives. This replaces the
old ATA interface, not to mention those two-lane highway
cables that come with it. SATA offers higher transfer
rates ( 150 MB/sec ) and a 7 pin cable which looks like
fishing line, next to the older ATA cables. The only
problem with this is how to get it to work with existing ATA
drives. Not to worry, Abit provides its own SERILLELTM
converter, which allows today's ATA drives to work with the
new SATA interface. That about covers the bundle.
Let's examine what's on the board itself.
Under The Scope: Layout and Features
The Abit NF7-S
carries most features an end user would like to see on
today's motherboards.
Pictured above
we have the back panel I/O connectors and the Northbridge (
SPP ) and Southbridge ( MCP-T ) chips. The back panel
is normal except for the S/PDIF out connector which is
onboard. This is the first nForce2 solution I have
seen that adds the S/P DIF out connector on the motherboard
itself. Besides that, we find the PS/2 connectors for
both the keyboard and mouse, a parallel port, two serial
ports, two USB 2.0 ports, a 10/100 Mb RJ-45 jack, and audio
I/O. The audio offers 5 channels, MIC in, Line in,
Front right + left speakers, Rear right + left speakers, and
a center/subwoofer channel. The onboard sound provided
by the nForce2 chipset is very good. Unless you're an
audiophile, there is no need for an add in soundcard.
The SPP Northbridge is cooled by a fan, which is removable
if a larger, after-market fan is deemed necessary.
The layout of
the board is nicely designed. The color of the PCB is
plain, which is not a downfall. However, with case
window mods becoming more and more common, this color will
not drop any jaws. The CPU socket is placed in its
usual spot atop the mainboard. The only space limiter
near the CPU socket are some can-type capacitors, which may
restrict the size of an aftermarket heatsink, but shouldn't
pose too much of a problem. Next to the capacitors we
find a two-phase power circuit. The NF7-S has two
power connectors. It has the same connectors found
mostly on boards designed for power hungry Pentium 4's, the
ATX +12VDC power with 300W, 20A +5VDC and a 720mA +5VSB for
supporting heavy loads. The power connectors are below
and to the left of the CPU socket, which allows the power
supply wires to find their way around the heatsink and fan.
To the right of the CPU socket we find 3 DIMM slots.
To take advantage of the Dual DDR configuration, there must
be two identical sticks of memory in slots 1 and 3.
The Floppy Disk Connector is placed to the right of the
third DIMM slot. I found this placement to be rather
awkward, when it came time to run the ribbon cables to their
devices. Close below the DIMM slots, almost a little
too close, we find the Primary and Secondary IDE connectors.
The board offers 1 AGP slot and 5 PCI slots. The SATA
interface is provided by the on board Silicon Image SIL3112A
Controller. Abit put a big green NF7-S sticker on this
controller. I found this rather odd since most would
not know what's below it. To the right of the
controller are two SATA connectors. The 10/100Mb LAN
is provided by Realtek's 8201BL Controller and the sound is
provided by an onboard 6 Channel AC 97 CODEC. Finally,
the board uses longer jumpers which are much easier to
maneuver than the short, flat ones. Overall, a solid
design which shouldn't pose any significant problems.
The
BIOS
Abit chose the
Phoenix AWARD BIOS for their board, which seems to be the
standard for nForce2 boards. Although the AWARD BIOS
is more familiar to us, this particular BIOS is far from
normal. Almost everything is tweakable in this BIOS
which makes this board a prime candidate for overclocking.
For starters, the CPU clock is adjustable in 1 MHz
increments all the way up to 237! That's a lot of
headroom for some serious horsepower. The only option
I could not find in the BIOS was the PCI lock. This is
one feature I like to see, since overclocking the front-side
bus also overclocks all the other devices. However,
the nForce2 seems to set the PCI bus to it's stock clock
speed, asynchronously from the front side bus.
The AGP is
adjustable and can be locked at 66MHz as well. To
change it, all you have to do is enter a decimal between 66
and 99. There are a number of FSB DRAM ratio settings,
pretty much everything from 3/3 all the way to 6/6.
This is perfect for getting the most out of that high end
memory. I think the greatest feature in this BIOS, is
the ability to change the multiplier. This gives you
the best possible combination to get the utmost performance
from the memory. If the memory isn't running at its
full potential, drop the multiplier and raise the FSB.
All voltages are adjustable: DRAM, CPU Core, AGP, and even
the chipset voltage. The CPU Core is only adjustable
to 1.85v in .25v increments. Also in the BIOS is the
PC Health monitor which displays the voltages and
temperatures of the system, so you can keep an eye on the
critical variants needed for a stable system. Overall,
I must say that this is the best BIOS I have seen for an
nForce2 board, to date.
Enough of the
nitty-gritty, let's take a look at our setup and the
benchmark results.
Setup
and Benchmarking
|
