Abit NF7-S Review - Abit NF7-S Review

Abit NF7-S Rev 1.2 Motherboard Review

Benchmarks:

Our goal here is to show you what you might expect from a similar setup with the same equipment. We are not going to get crazy here. We all know the expectations of the nForce2 chipset. We plan to show you a few normal (mostly synthetic) benchmarks and then move on to overclocking. When reviewing a motherboard, we want to look at features, compatibilities, performance, then overclocking. So let's take a look at it..

Test System:

System 1:

• ABIT NF7-S Rev 1.2 Motherboard

• AMD AthlonXP 2600+ (333FSB)

• 512MB OCZ HD PC3200 DDR (1 stick)

• 512MB Corsair TWINX Matched Module Pair PC3200 DDR (2 x 256MB sticks)

• Maxtor 60GB 7200RPM Hard Drive

• Maxtor 160GB DiamondMax Plus 9 SATA Drive

• Albatron 128MB GeForce4 Ti4200 Turbo

System 2:

• ABIT KD7-RAID Motherboard

• AMD AthlonXP 2600+ (333FSB)

• 512MB Corsair TWINX Matched Module Pair PC3200 DDR (2 x 256MB sticks)

• Maxtor 60GB 7200RPM Hard Drive

• Albatron 128MB GeForce4 Ti4200 Turbo

We are going to run the benchmarks with the single stick of OCZ 512MB memory (in slot 3) and also the Corsair TWINX (2x256MB) 512MB sticks (in slots 1 and 3). This will allow us to see the difference in the dual channel compatibilities of the nForce2 chipset and also running a single stick. Let's get started..

SiSoft Sandra 2003 Benchmark Utility:

We'll start with SiSoft Sandra, a program that is generally accepted as an industry standard. While this application is theoretically a "synthetic benchmark", it's comparison across a broad range of systems makes it attractive for our uses today.

CPU Arithmetic:

KD7-RAID	NF7-S (OCZ)	NF7-S (Corsair)

We see here that the NF7-S is pretty much in line with what we got with the KD7 which utilizes the KT400 chipset from VIA.

CPU Multimedia:

KD7-RAID	NF7-S (OCZ)	NF7-S (Corsair)

Again, we see here much of the same. I would have been surprised to see an increase in either of these two scores as they are judging the CPU itself and not necessarily the chipset, so far so good...

Memory Bandwidth:

KD7-RAID	NF7-S (OCZ)	NF7-S (Corsair)

Hmm, now these are results that surprise me a little bit. All that we've heard about with the nForce2 chipset and the "dual channel" memory bus, I would have expected at least a marginal improvement here. What we actually see is the boards being all but dead even thru all three of SiSoft's benchmark's so far.

Moving on, let's head to page 5 and check out what SATA has to offer for hard drives and some other popular benchmarks...

Next: Abit NF7-S Review >>
 

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