The BIOS

The SoftMenu III piggybacks on the Pheonix AwardBIOS that is common to all nForce 2 motherboards. Abit being Abit, we have high hopes that their BIOS options would not disappoint. The usual suspects are here, such as the Power Management, PC Health Status, and the PnP/PCI Configurations options. Nothing fancy here, and nothing we haven't seen before.

The real fun begins with the SoftMenu III Setup. It is here where you have access to manipulate the multiplier, FSB and voltages. The ABIT 5-bit FID Override technology is a feature present on their high-end boards, and what that means for you is that the CPU, so long as it's a Thoroughbred and up, will become unlocked when plugged into the NF7-M. If you were always confused about how to unlock a TBred, no fear, as Abit has done that for you. With the v1.6 BIOS, the FSB options have been increased, and tops out at 250FSB. Not exactly something we expect to get up to here, but at least we got something to shoot for.

Ideally, you'll want to run your CPU and memory synchronous for maximum performance. Naturally, you can make adjustments if you got a 266FSB TBred, and PC2700 (or faster) ram. Another thing you can do is lock down the AGP frequency so that it doesn't become a hindering factor when increasing the FSB.

There are plenty of voltage options, which is something that was improved when Abit made the move to the revision v1.2 PCB. The CPU vCore options are up to a whopping 2.3v. This is great for overclockers, but if you're going to pump that much juice into your setup, you better have one heck of a cooler in place. For your ram, the voltage increased to 2.9v, which isn't bad, but surprisingly low considering how much Abit jacked the CPU voltage options. For your chipset, you can go as high as 1.7v, and for the AGP, 1.8v.

Another strong area is the Advanced Chipset Features. Here, you have access to the memory options, which also includes access to setting up the amount of ram for the IGP, which starts at 8MB, and can be as much as 128MB.

Overclocking

Overclocking is something that Abit is very well known for, and the NF7-M does not fail to disappoint. Be aware that when you overclock the memory, it's highly recommended that you disable the onboard IGP and go with a dedicated AGP card.

The NF7-M allows for unlocking Athlon XPs, TBreds and up only. What this means is there is no need to physically modify the CPU to gain access to multipliers 13 and lower. Our first test was to see how high a FSB we were able to attain. This means lowering the multiplier to 8, and jacking up FSB speeds until we reach instability. We chose an 8 multiplier since I feel that if a specific FSB wouldn't work at 8, it'd probably not work at anything lower, but needless to say, I will experiment with some lower multipliers if needed.

Stability was tested running Prime95 overnight, and if by the next day it was still running, we'd consider it a success. In many cases, if the system was unstable, you'd know it within anywhere from 5 seconds, to 5 minutes.

I should stress that if your board is not running the v1.6 BIOS, you should upgrade immediately. Not only do you gain extra FSB options, the BIOS resolves many issues that arose after its release in regards to overclocking and unbootable PCs.

Right off the bat, we went with 8x250, the maximum FSB available. This was met with a blank screen, so I dropped the multiplier to 5, but we were met with the same results. Moving back to 8, I tried a 230FSB, and this worked without a hitch, albeit after bumping the vCore to 1.85v (which was also done with the 250FSB attempt as well). We were able successfully boot into Windows, and Prime95 ran without any problems. We then began bumping the FSB to the point where we were no longer able to boot into Windows. We managed to get up to 8x240, but Prime95 kept failing within minutes. In fact, nothing in Windows seemed to work, so we started moving back down. At 8x238, Prime95 passed its tests, and we called it a day.

An 8x238 equals 1.9GHz, which is lower than the XP 2400+'s rated speed, so I bumped the multiplier up to 12, and tested various FSB options to find the right mix of OC, stability and speed.

With the vCore at 1.85, this was about as fast as we got. Prime95 ran through its tests, and over the course of a week, the system was running quite well at this speed.

Test Setup

Abit NF7-M nForce2: Athlon XP 2400+ provided by (15x133: 2.0GHz, 12x166: 1.992GHz), 2 x 256MB Corsair TWINX PC3200 Ram, ATi Radeon 9700 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, nForce 2 Unified Driver Package 2.0, ATi Catalyst 3.2

MSI K7N2G-ILSR nForce2: Athlon XP 2400+ provided by (15x133: 2.0GHz, 12x166: 1.992GHz), 2 x 256MB Corsair TWINX PC3200 Ram, ATi Radeon 9700 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, nForce 2 Unified Driver Package 2.0, ATi Catalyst 3.2

Test software will be:

SiSoft Sandra 2003
PC Mark 2002
PiFast
3D Mark 2001SE
Unreal Tournament 2003
Quake 3: Arena
Jedi Knight 2

We're going to be doing our game benchmarks a little differently than we normally do for motherboard reviews. We will be running all the game benchmarks first, with the 9700 Pro, at 640x480, at low quality settings. The exception will be 3D Mark 2001SE, which will be run at 1024x768, default settings. The second group of tests will be at 1024x768 and up with the built in IGP. Games will be run at high quality settings, with the exception of 3D Mark, which will be at default.

Comparison motherboard will be the MSI K7N2G-ILSR nForce 2. Benchmarks will be run at the 2400+ stock speed of 2GHz (133FSB), as well as at a 166FSB with a 12x multiplier.