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)

Overclocking:

We have always had an easy time overclocking ABIT motherboards. The options available in the BIOS give us the tools we need to achieve a nice overclock. Testing the overclocking capability was easy on this motherboard. First thing we did was put the memory in dual channel mode by using DIMM slots 3 and 2. Using DIMM slots 3 and either 1 or 2 puts utilizes the 128-bit controller. The memory we used was Corsair XMS 3500 platinum series. We also used our AMD Athlon XP2800 Thoroughbred B. The multipliers on this chip are already unlocked by the motherboard so we did not have to make any modifications to the CPU.

Since these boards support the 400 MHz FSB Bartons, we decided that we would start our testing a 200 FSB. We lowered the multiplier on the CPU so that every time we made an increase in FSB, the CPU would be as close to stock speed as possible. At 200 FSB, we had no problems at all. We could run any test and the NF7-S passed all of them even running Prime 95 over night. Then we went up in 5 MHz increments until we could not go higher due to system instabilities. Using 1.7V for the VDD, we were able to get to 225 FSB stable. At 225 FSB, we could run through all of our tests. We did not encounter any issues at this speed. We were not able to get over 228 stable. The computer would make it into windows all the way up to 232 but was not steady.

We were very impressed with the NF7-S in terms of overclocking. Doing 228 straight out of the box is an amazing feat in itself. We have not tested any other boards for the AMD platform that were able to do this until now. This is definitely the best overclocking nForce 2 motherboard.

Test Setups & Benchmarks Used: