ABIT NF7-S v2.0

Company: ABIT
Product: NF7-S v2.0
Street Price: ~$125 USD
Date Reviewed: April 18, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey C. aka Chong345
Overall Rating: (9.8/10)

Board Layout:

Most people overlook a motherboard’s layout. The layout, however, is essential because it determines such things as what types of heat sinks can be used, how far the IDE cables will have to reach.

Let us start with some of the things that we feel could have been better. The AGP slot is very close to the DIMM slots. A long video card similar to the GeForce 4 TI4600 would go across almost all the memory slots. This means that it is imperative that the graphics card be removed to be able to remove the memory.

Another problem we see a lot is the placement of the motherboard power connections. We generally would like to see them at the upper right hand corner. Placing the connections here keeps the power cables out of the way of most of the components. ABIT has placed the power connections on the left side of the board, roughly to the left of the Northbridge. The power cables from the power supply may possibly conflict with the heat sink. The good thing about the connections on the motherboard is that they are not surrounded by capacitors and we have seen that many times on other motherboards.

The rest of the board layout is excellent. The IDE and floppy ports are on the far right side of the mainboard. They are also high enough to where they will reach drives with ease even in full tower cases. The CMOS battery lays flat on the board. This type of positioning is better than using the vertical battery placement. The vertical battery socket is very easy to break and is not good design. The jumper to reset the CMOS is easy to use because it is much longer than the average length. There is also plenty of room around the socket to fit a large heat sink. There are only a few capacitors to the right of the socket. Furthermore, as we have stated earlier, the four holes around the socket are present on this motherboard. This gives the ability to use water blocks and heat sinks that mount using these four holes.