Abit NF7-S Review - Abit NF7-S Review
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Abit NF7-S Rev 1.2 Motherboard Review
The BIOS is Your Friend..
Upon hitting the delete key during post you're taken to the BIOS. What we are greeted with on initial display is the same screen we've grown accustom to seeing..
The softmenu again doesn't stray far from our expectations upon initial look..
Where it gets immediately exciting after being used to the Via KTxxx chipset motherboards is the presence of a 1/6 PCI divider. Actually, they have several multiples. For example. "6/6" would mean you divide the front side bus by 6 to get your PCI divider, then multiply the PCI bus times six to make your DDR memory speed. So with a 200MHz Front side bus, you're PCI's would be at a very normal 33Mhz, while your memory runs at the full 200MHz. Make sense?
Three other things of note in the softmenu portion of the BIOS are the AGP bus speed, the system FSB, and a thermal protection setting. In the NF7-S Rev 1.2 board you can lock the AGP bus anywhere between 66MHz- and 99Mhz. While I personally have never seen a significant improvement by overclocking the AGP bus, it's nice that ABIT through the nForce2 chipset gives you the option.
The NF7 flashed to the latest "official" bios (nf7_15) also allows you to go up to 237MHz Front side bus. That is higher than the majority of the nForce2 boards on the market. Props to ABIT for pushing the envelope there.
The thermal sensor is relatively self explanatory, but a nice feature all the same. Basically it is a built in panic button. You can set the CPU protect temperature to be 85, 95, 100, or 110 degrees Celsius and the board will automatically shut down if that temperature is exceeded. Not something that hopefully any of us with ever need, but nice to see it incase we forget to plug that CPU fan in or something of the like.
Now we move on to the voltage settings that the softmenu offers. It goes from excessively good to average depending on the category and your particular aspirations for the board. The CPU VCore voltage, where as in the older revisions of the NF7-S was limited to 1.85v, allows you to run an INSANE 2.3volts. Do I recommend that? Um, no. BUT, it saves the overly brave from the need to modify their board to get the extra volts. It forces you to rely on common sense and temperature monitoring more, but what I like is that it leaves it up to US, not the manufacturer as to how far we'd like to push our chips.
The memory speed is relatively at the other end of the spectrum. Allowing settings .10 increments from 2.6 to a moderate 2.9. That said, I have never taken my DDR voltage over 2.8 and have no plans to in the immediate future, so this is more than enough in my opinion. Some of you insane peeps out there however may feel otherwise.
The AGP voltage is set similar to the memory in that it's 1.5v - 1.8v in the same .10 increments. I really don't have a solid opinion on this one way or the other. With the incredible speeds of today's modern graphics cards, I personally don't feel the necessity to push my AGP too far. That said, the option is here if you're interested...
The chipset voltage is another setting we're not used to seeing. It has settings of 1.4v thru 1.7v. in experimenting with this I was never able to see a difference one way or the other by upping the voltage here. My guess is that it's because the chipset was never my limiting factor, which can be seen as nothing but a good thing..
One additional thing I wanted to mention about the softmenu screen is really no big thing, but I found it interesting. In the past for operating speed we've scrolled thru basically every CPU setting the board supports, with "User Defined" being the final option. In this nForce2 chipset it autodetects the speed of the installed CPU, and gives you the option of the default speed or "User Defined". This is actually something I prefer as it takes some scrolling out of the game to get to what 99% of us are going to use anyway, which is of COURSE "user defined'!!
The rest of the BIOS is pretty much exactly what you'd expect from the nForce2 chipset. The option to turn on/off all of the onboard features. SATA, Firewire, sound, LAN, etc.. The only other area that deems mentioning IMHO is the memory settings.
The memory settings give you four options to choose from. Optimal, Aggressive, Turbo, By SPD, and Expert. Turbo being the fastest, optimal being the slowest. Just to let you know why reading the manual is so important, I ran optimal at first ASSUMING it was the best and couldn't figure out why my memory scores were so bad. Patience and a little reading quickly cleared that up. So RTFM!!
nForce2 chipsets are known for their dual channel memory speed and flexibility, well they don't disappoint. With settings for everything memory related under the sun, your options are all but limitless. All I can recommend here is to curl up with the manual and a six pack of your favorite flavor and find out for yourself what settings are right for you. Nothing replaces mindless experimentation, but reading the manual to get some guidelines first certainly helps!
With the BIOS of the NF7-S Rev 1.2 we could literally go on for another 8 pages, but I think we've given you a good idea of what to expect here.
BIOS Issues of Note:
While breaking in our NF7-S Rev 1.2 there were a few things that came up that were of HUGE concern. Both items are BIOS related and can likely be attributed to the fact that the nForce2 chipset is still relatively new, but issue's all the same.
The first issue was that I basically toasted a BIOS chip. While I felt horribly stupid for a while, after a bit of research I found that my problem with the nForce2 was not uncommon, and actually was happening quite a bit.
What happened was that I was trying a pretty outrageous overclock and upon saving the BIOS to reboot the screen froze on the "Please do not power off computer while BIOS is saving" screen. After about 35min I realized that it was NOT going to reboot itself, and it was indeed locked. After manually rebooting it simply was dead. It would not boot again. What I ended up doing was taking a BIOS from a nF7-2 Rev 1.1 I had lying here and doing the "hot swap" with the BIOS chip and flashing a good BIOS back onto my bad chip.
After looking around the net I found THIS ARTICLE at the Inquirer which explains it all. Apparently nVidia recommended a jumper that would automatically knock the FSB back to 100MHz in the event of this problem, saving all of this hassle. Abit, among several other premier board manufacturers saw fit to not include that jumper. This decision cost several board owners HUGE headaches. I was lucky to have a spare chip, most end users are not. There IS a beta BIOS released by Abit which supposedly clears this problem, but little good that does after you've smoked your BIOS file.
The second issue occured when running the new Corsair XMS TWINX Matched Modules that were designed to run on the nForce2 platform. On a fresh install of the motherboard, basically everything would be dead. No boot, no BIOS beep, nothing. After replacing the Corsair RAM with some OCZ technologies PC3200 I had lying around the board booted fine. I assumed that the Corsair was simply bad memory, but when I placed it back in the KD7 motherboard it ran like a champ. I placed the Corsair in the NF7-2 and now it was running fine. Hmmm... I cleared the BIOS, rebooted, and wham, nothing again. I put the OCZ back in, presto, system worked again.
Well after researching this issue we came across THIS POST in the Corsair forums. Basically Corsair acknowledges the problem with nForce2 chipsets and their temporary fix is to place memory of a different speed (or in our case different brand) in the board to initially boot, THEN put your TWINX back in the board. Does their temp fix work? Yes. Is it ridiculous to spend big jack on top quality memory only to need other memory laying around to use it? Most definitely!
This issue as well has been corrected with a BIOS update (we used "nf7_16" from ABIT's FTP site and both of these problems were resolved and we were unable to recreate either, though we tried hard to.
So why mention these problems at all if they were resolved with a BIOS update? Because to me this is evidence of a R&D department failure that is pretty disheartening from a manufacturer that we've come to trust. Both of these are MAJOR problems that can cause paying customers BIG TIME headaches, so it caused me some concern.
I blame Corsair for designing a product (TWINX) specifically for a product that it has compatibility issues with and not resolving them before release. And I blame ABIT and other board manufacturers for not following the reference design from nVidia and using the jumper to resolve the problem. At the end of the day we are running and very happy with both the Corsair memory and the ABIT nForce 2 NF7-S, but would have appreciated some forward thinking by both manufacturers to make things easier.
I have discussed this with the folks from ABIT, and I have to say that they've handled this problem pretty diligently. They reacted as soon as they could with a BIOS fix and also are supporting those people that have experienced a burned out BOIS chip as far as I've been told. Boo to ABIT for not beta testing this board better, props to ABIT for reacting quickly once it WAS discovered.
All of this said, it's time to put the screws to this board and see what it can do. Let's ead to page 4 and benchmark this thing..
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