The Right Decision
Written: Aug 10 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Feature rich, stable, fast, efficient design, heat protection, overclocking ability.
Cons: Nothing so far.
The Bottom Line: If you need a motherboard to offer great performance, great stability and a plethora of awesome features at a good price, this is the board for you.
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| nlhlacrosse's Full Review: Abit NF7-S Motherboard |
Your Needs
Lately I joined the market looking to build three new systems; one for brother, one for a friend and one for myself. I wanted to use the same motherboard for all of us just because it would help the research and building processes pass far more quickly. If I could find a board that would allow me to do on each system what was required of the users, I would be ecstatic. And I soon found out that I would be very lucky that Abit produced such a board for my needs.
The Research Process
The first step to finding the right motherboard is finding your needs. You must decide what you want your system to do and what you would like to (or need to) use it for. For example, my friend and I enjoy gaming and casual desktop work (since I'm a Computer Science major, programming is also common). My brother, however, is a very multimedia oriented user. He uses his computer to write and produce music and does not use many 3D intensive applications. This began the research process of finding which motherboard would suit our needs.
My next step was to actually begin the research. I use computer hardware sites such as http://www.tomshardware.com and http://www.anandtech.com, but there are plenty of others for the choosing. When searching for a motherboard, you want to find hardware sites that do roundups of various motherboards using various chipsets (in this case, the NForce2), and forums where you can talk to and inquire from the users of a plethora of boards.
Basically, you want to scour the reviews on the site and the feedback in the forums to find what motherboard is right for your needs, and I found that I should be looking for the best NForce2 board. "Best" being defined as a blissful mix of performance and stability. My initial plan was to go with the most recent Asus board as I had just built a system for myself a year ago using the A7V333 and had very few problems. However, upon reading up on the A7N8X (which is certainly a great product) I found that the earlier releases had too many issues and there were too many incompatibilities with the board. I realized I would be fine troubleshooting what little quirks came about upon using it, but there was no way I was going to leave my friend and brother up to dealing with their systems' issues after I built it. Although performance was high enough, I had heard better things about some other boards. I moved on.
Next, I went through the Epox and Gigabyte NForce2 boards (The 8RDA and the 7NNXP, I believe). I found that the Gigabyte boards were causing forum users to swear they would never build a custom system again, simply because of the vast amount of errors still not fixed in the latest revisions. I moved to the Epox board which, after a few hours of reading, I was ready to purchase. I double checked everything and inquired further about the board and was directed to the Abit NF7-S line of motherboards, saying that the Epox was cheaper but just neither as stable nor powerful. This came from two forums I have used and trusted in the past, so I followed the path and researched more and more.
One thing to keep in mind upon researching motherboards is to look for boards that have been out for a few months. Wait for the new revisions and the BIOS updates - if you get the new board right away, you're bound to have some issues.
Note
As a side note, please be sure to research thoroughly what other components you can use with your desired motherboard. This is a very important facet to both the motherboard selection process and system building process.
The Final Decision
Finally, I decided to go with the NF7-S. It's known for its stability, its speed and its ease of use. If you wish to overclock it (for advanced users) then it is very overclockable. There is heat protection if you're not confident in your cooling (of which you will likely need, at least, decent). The BIOS is very nice to use, complete with the well known Abit Soft menu, the advanced chipset features, power settings, health monitor, peripherals configuration and more. You can also load a preset profile - optimal settings or failsafe settings. Such a nice, easy BIOS can always help a motherboard's case.
Purchasing
The next step is to make sure you're getting the revision of the board you have selected, because revisions can cause many differences concerning a board's performance. I use http://www.pricewatch.com to find the best prices, but there are plenty of similar sites and great online resellers (or offline, if you are so lucky). I found this board in July for $114 from a good online reseller (use http://www.resellerratings.com), and ordered three. I was pleased to see that the online reseller had ensured the boards would be revision 2.0, the latest and most stable revision.
Building
Building on this board was great. I like to use quiet fans, but I require good cooling as well (I like to overclock a bit), so I use bigger heatsinks than most users. This board can almost fit any large heatsink (I believe there is one heatsink that needs to have its fins bent a little, the SLK-900 perhaps). I use the latest from swiftech, the MCX462 , and it fits perfectly. Installation was easy - the board is as sturdy as you would expect and easy to use, displaying some efficient placement and planning of circuitry, of course.
Installation of the board into the case was easy and, following Abit's manual of course, every subsequent step was clear, producing a painless building process. I found no problems with fitting this in my Lian Li case or connecting almost all of the components. Almost all of the components.
The AGP 8x slot in the NF7-S has a clip for you to use when attaching the AGP cards, clamping the card down further into the AGP socket (seemingly unnecessary). At first, I had installed the motherboard standoffs wrong so my brother's older, GeForce 2 wouldn't fit. That was my fault, and it fit after I did the standoffs correctly. However, when I finished my system, the clamp wouldn't close fully on my GeForce 4. The card entered the slot fully and fit snugly into the opening in the rear of the case, but did not allow the clamp to close. Perhaps I did not research this aspect well enough, but I was under the impression the clamp should close. Nevertheless, I knew the connection was made between components and booted up without a problem (on the first attempt with this board).
All in all, the building process was smooth and each system booted up on the first try (this was not a result of good building, but a result of quality components pieced together as they should be).
Performance
Right away, I noticed how quickly our systems booted. This was a combination of the chipset's speed and the fact that we were using the AMD Barton 2500 or 2000 , Crucial PC3200 RAM (which now works very smoothly with this board), and Maxtor drives (mine is the DiamondMax Plus 9 with 2mb cache). I did not yet enable SATA, but I will soon (at which point I will update this review, though I've heard very little negative about this configuration).
One thing to note is that while booting, the system will appear to hang while it searches for installed SATA drives if you don't have them. It's simply looking for them, and will continue booting after it finds none. Just disable this in the BIOS through the Peripherals section and the system will boot incredibly fast (much faster than my already ephemerally timed A7V333 and XP1800 system).
How do the features perform?
This section will cover all of the various features included with this board and how they live up to the expectations. Note that this review will be updated when I get around to using all these components (as I'm currently enjoying this system plenty while only barely overclocking).
FSB 400
This system does indeed reach 400 FSB. It automatically unlocks the Barton processors, so you can overclock the FSB to 2x200mhz (I suggest doing this in 1mhz increments, but refer to an overclocking guide to be safe). I have not yet personally reached this point, but plan to. I have read about many who are running stable at this FSB, so I find their claims worthwhile (much more so than some other, competing motherboards).
Dual DDR 400
First off, unless you're using onboard sound (on one of the other models of the NF7), dual channel RAM only improves performance very slightly (2 - 3 percent). Use either DIMM slots 1 and 3 or 2 and 3 to utilize dual channel and, yes, it does work but, as aforementioned, it is not very much necessary.
AGP 8x
If you use an AGP 8x card, the slot is available for you to take full advantage of the card's features and speed. You can also use lesser cards (AGP 4x, etc.) and you can set your 8x card to run at 4x and lesser timings.
SATA 150
I will be using this in the very near future and have heard very good things about it. As with any SATA (Serial ATA) setup, problems can be experienced, but there is much help on this subject all over the internet and in the bundled manual.
ATA 133
I'm currently using ATA 133 on my drive, and it's fine. No errors, no problems, just as fast as it should be.
IEEE 1394
I do not use firewire and honestly don't plan to, so I would not review this portion of the board dishonestly. I can say that I have heard of very little issues concerning this device, but I have no personal experience with it.
USB 2.0
The USB 2.0 ports work just as they should: fast, reliable and stable upon hot swapping. You can insert and remove components safely while the system is on and running. This motherboard has two USB ports, potentially with the option for more (I have to check into that).
Onboard Audio
My brother doesn't use this (he has an Audiophile 2496 from M-Audio), but I like mine a lot. It's Nvidia's soundstorm technology, and it's definitely better than the onboard sound on my A7V333. Both are fine and I use 2 piece Altec Lansing speakers with them.
Onboard 10/100 LAN
I've found the onboard ethernet to be much faster than PCI ethernet cards I have installed in my other systems. I'm very glad they bundled such an excellent NIC onboard with this motherboard. No problems.
Installation of drivers and such will definitely help performance. I'm running Windows XP (home with SP1), the latest NForce2 drivers (though I've heard better about the 2.03 series) and DirectX 9. Everything is well, and I plan to continue tweaking the more I use this system.
I can safely say with confidence that I chose the best Socket A motherboard on the market in purchasing the ABIT NF7-S motherboard. It is fast, stable and feature rich and I would recommend it to anyone searching for a great motherboard. It was well worth the money in July, and I believe it will continue to be such until something superior comes along in both performance and stability.
If you feel I missed something vital, please leave a comment and I will address it.
Enjoy!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 114
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Epinions.com ID:
nlhlacrosse
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Reviews written: 7
Trusted by: 1 member
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