The Abit NF7-S is a high end nForce2 offering, with SATA and firewire, along with all the usual nForce2 goodies. It retails for around £90.

Specification and Features

Nforce 2 SPP Northbridge nForce 2 MCP2-T Southbridge
AGP 8x
Dual DDR 266/333/400 support
Onboard LAN
USB 2.0 X4 Firewire X2
2X SATA channels
Onboard 6 channel audio

Layout and aesthetics

This board is the plainest looking in the roundup, the board itself is not coloured, and all the slots and connectors are in standard colours. I personally, much prefer this approach to colouring all the plastic bits any hue that takes the manufacturers fancy. The most striking feature on this otherwise plain board, is the orb style Northbridge cooler. Whilst a far from ideal design, is certainly stylish in an understated way. The CPU area is completely unobstructed, and any heatsink would fit easily, but strangely the 4 mounting holes are missing, which excludes the use of many waterblocks. The ATX connector positioning is far from ideal for those with short ATX leads - it is the lowest down I have ever seen, it is only an inch above the AGP slot. This is very bad for cable routing unless you have long ATX leads, my testbed doesn't, and I had trouble keeping it out of the CPU fan. This board only has 2 fan headers, the normal CPU fan one, and another just above the AGP slot, in a suitable position for either GPU cooling, Northbridge cooling, or a case exhaust. The strangest feature of this boards layout is there are only 5 PCI slots; the space normally occupied by the top PCI slot is taken up with pin headers for Firewire, and power circuitry for the AGP slot.

Usability

The manual is a thick, very comprehensive book and all in English apart from a quick start chapter that is repeated in 6 languages. The manual covers everything you could possibly want to know, if you can find it in there. It includes detailed descriptions of all the connectors and headers, and all the BIOS options. There is even a step by step illustrated guide to installing the drivers that even my mother could follow. And she has trouble with using clipart! Just to make things complete, there is a guide to flashing the BIOS, and a short trouble shooting section. The board itself is simple to install, although I had to flip through the manual to find out where to put the power on button. The BIOS is straightforward and I had no problems with it.

Performance and overclocking

Performance is good, with few differences between this board and the rest in the roundup. It seemed to score a little lower than the rest on the memory bandwidth benchmarks, but did better in the SYSmark tests. The only notable thing was that it would not run DDR400 at "aggressive" timings, so there are no DDR400 benchmark results. The NF7-S is a good candidate for overclocking, with all the BIOS options you could want, and plenty of room for a good heatsink. The weak point is the Northbridge sink, which is just a flat plate with a fan blowing on it. In practice it didn't actually get more than slightly warm at 166mhz, which was surprising, but if you are aiming for a really high FSB you will want to replace it. The only other flaw is the lack of mounting holes around the CPU socket. Perhaps these will be added on a later revision.

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