Introduction
Most people know that the original nForce motherboard were pretty disappointing after all the hype had been generated about them. With that said nVidia did a great job with the nForce 2 motherboards I can say after reading many reviews so I am looking forward to this review. Abit has long been a very high quality manufacturer of motherboards and video cards and this motherboard should be no different. This motherboard is the NF7-S rev 2.0 which is the newest revision, revision 2.0 features the new crush 18D nvidia chipset which should allow for better overclocking a a few new features. The specifications below are taken from the Abit website.
Processor
- Supports AMD-K7 Duron™/Athlon™/Athlon™ XP Socket A with 200/266/333MHz FSB Processors
Chipset
- NVIDIA nForce2 SPP chipset with MCP2-T
- Supports Advanced Configuration and Power Management Interface (ACPI)
- Accelerated Graphics Port connector supports AGP 8X/4X (0.8V/1.5V)
Memory
- Three 184-pin DIMM sockets
- Supports 3 DIMM DDR 200/266/333 (Max. 3GB)
- Supports 2 DIMM DDR 400 (Max. 2GB)
Serial ATA
- On board Serial ATA PCI Controller
- Supports SATA data transfer rates 150MB/s (1.5G bps)
Audio
- 6-Channel AC 97 CODEC on board
- Professional digital audio interface supports 24-bit S/PDIF Out
- Supports real time AC-3 Encode by Soundstorm™ Technology
System BIOS
- SoftMenu™ Technology
- Award Plug and Play BIOS
LAN
- On board 10/100Mb LAN Physical layer interface
- 10/100Mb Operation supports ACPI & Wake on LAN
IEEE 1394
- Supports IEEE 1394a at 100/200/400MB/s transfer rate
Internal I/O Connectors
- 1 x AGP8X/4X slot, 5 x PCI slots
- 1 x Floppy Port supports up to 2.88MB
- 2 x Ultra DMA 33/66/100/133 Connectors
- 2 x Serial ATA 150 Connectors
- 2 x USB headers, 2 x IEEE1394a header
- 2 x CD-IN, 1 x IrDA
Back Panel I/O
- 1 x PS/2 Keyboard, 1 x PS/2 mouse
- 2 x Serial, 1 x Parallel
- 1 x S/PDIF Out port
- Audio connectors (Front Speaker, Line-in, Mic-in, Center/Sub, Surround Speaker)
- 2 x USB, 1 x RJ-45 LAN Connector
Miscellaneous
- ATX form factor
- Hardware monitoring - Including Fan speeds, Voltages, System environment temperature
As you can see this motherboard has some pretty impressive specifications however there is more to this board than just specs. There are a few other features I wanted to look at in more detail before we move on. The first is Abit's CPU H.T.P. (Hardware Thermal Protection) this feature will prevent your CPU from overheating and being destroyed by using hardware detection rather than software. One of the coolest overclocking features this motherboard has is 5 Bit Frequency ID which basically allows you to unlock your CPU without unlocking it physically. Below is a quote from Abit on their 5 Bit Frequency ID.
"By ABIT 5-bit FID Override technology, users can get variety of CPU over-clocking sets.
For example, if user gets a AMD Athlon XP 2400+ CPU by 133MHz (FSB)x15(Multiplier)= 2000MHz(CPU/DDR=133/166), that means user only can adjust the FSB to get an over-clocking performance without 5-bits FID override technology. Otherwise he can adjust the frequency through 5-bits FID override by 166MHz x12=2000MHz (CPU/DDR=166/166) or 100MHz x20=2000MHz (CPU/DDR=100/100)to gain a best performance platform."Continued...
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