Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C. February
7th,
2003-Adrian Wong, creator of Adrian's Rojak Pot Recently reviewed the ABIT
NF7-S.
"The nForce2...boasting official 333MHz front side bus and DDR333 (with
unofficial DDR400) support,...supports the new AGP8X transfer protocol which
provides up to 2.1GB of bandwidth on the AGP bus. The IGP (Integrated Graphics
Processor) was updated with a GeForce4 MX core running at 250MHz.
Incredible Features
 To offer greater flexibility in terms of price and features, there are actually
two platform processors as well as two Media and Communications Processors (MCP)
to mix and match! The two platform processors are the aforementioned IGP and the
new SPP (System Platform Processor) which is basically the IGP without the
GeForce4 MX GPU. The MCPs come in two flavours - the basic MCP and MPC-T. The
basic MCP come with USB 2.0, ATA/133, NVIDIA's own Ethernet MAC and basic AC'97
audio support. The MCP-T is really the MCP to get. It comes with additional
features like Firewire (IEEE-1394a) support, NVIDIA's APU (Audio Processing
Unit) and a second Ethernet MAC from 3Com! The NF7-S is an Overclocking Champion
From the plethora of overclocking features in the NF7-S, you can tell it was
designed to meet the demands of the overclocker. Not only does it come with a
wide range of FSB speeds and multipliers, the NF7-S also allows you to manually
select the AGP bus speed from 66MHz up to 99MHz! You can also adjust the CPU
core voltage as well as the voltages of the DDR SDRAM interface, the AGP bus and
even the nForce2 chipset itself! When it comes to overclocking features, ABIT
really can't be beaten. The NF7-S is destined to join other ABIT motherboards as
yet another favourite amongst overclockers.
ABIT should also be praised for their initiative in shipping the NF7-S with the
Serillel as well as the +12V power connector. The Serillel allows the Serial ATA
controller to be of some practical use right now, instead of several years down
the line. The +12V power connector, on the other hand, allows more power to be
channeled to the motherboard. Coupled with the cool-running 3-phase switching
voltage regulator, the +12V power connector paves the way for the NF7-S to
support future processors with ease.
"...the NF7-S has proven to be a solid motherboard. The numerous clock speed and
voltage controls as well as AGP and PCI locks made it a real pleasure to
overclock. And until today, I have not had any noteworthy problem with it."
Here is a summary of what Adrian felt were the best features:
Lots of overclocking features in the BIOS.
Manual AGP lock.
ATX12V-compliance via inclusion of the +12V power connector
Serial ATA-150 support
Ships with a free Serillel SATA converter.
Comes with an active cooler for the north bridge
For the full review go here:
http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx?location=3&var1=16&var2=0
For more on ABIT go here:
http://www.abit-usa.com
ABIT Computer Corporation designs and sells a complete family of award-winning
mainboards and multimedia products that support industry-leading technology and
provide leading quality and performance for system integration of computer
components supporting a broad range of PC applications, such as e-commerce,
e-business, entertainment and education. Corporate headquarters are located in
Taiwan. For more information, visit the Company's web site at
http://www.abit.com.tw
ABIT USA Corp. Web Site:
http://www.abit-usa.com
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