ABIT NF7-S v1.2 nForce2 Mainboard (8)
Overclocker 5 Apr 2003

ABIT NF7-S v1.2 is a feature packed board designed for overclockers. It not only has the 5 bit FID, its SoftmenuIII is the complete with large voltage adjustments for those who love to overclock.  With the Serillel converter, NF7-S users can replace old IDE cables with SATA connected to PATA drives. Similarly, the on board SATA and AGP 8x lowers I/O overhead of the system. There is also the USB 2.0 and 1394 for external connectivity. The package also comes with a multilingual manual which is useful for non native english readers.

In the performance, the board seems to be slightly slower than most nForce2 boards we have tested so far. This is probably due to the lower Clk speed of 166.36 compared to 167.05 on most nForce2 boards. The board, just like most nForce2 boards performs better in 3D but for CCWS and BWS, it is not so. We suspect that the BIOS is tuned towards better performance in 3D applications than in I/O disk bound applications. From the way we look at it, it seems that if every board default clk speed is at 166.67mhz, the difference between the chipsets will be narrower. We also noticed that the F15 BIOS is better than the latest F16 BIOS in memory benchmarks.

In overclocking, we managed to overclock the board without much problems at all. Using our AXP 2700+, running it at 10 x 200mhz is so much easier than before. Just set the vcore to 1.75v and we got it stable at 200/200. I would say that this board would work well with future Bartons 400 CPUs but this would be unofficial support. We have heard news of a NF7-S v2.0 that is out in the market, it seems to use a newer north bridge stepping C1 and readers have written in claiming that they can overclock even better.

The board performs as it claims but the BIOS needs some tuning to make it better.

Price info : NA

(Related Reviews/Galleries : AOpen AK79GMax nforce2 board, SiS 746FX Ref Board, ECS L7S7A SiS746 Mainboard, Gigabyte 7VAXP-A Ultra KT400A)

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