ABIT boards have always been solid overclockers, but with the NF7-M, we did have some struggles getting our Barton 2500+ to overclock above 200FSB. The board would boot past 200FSB, but it would hardly be anything I'd call stable. Given that the NF7-S v.2.0 is 400FSB (200FSB double pumped), I had some hope we'd have better success this time around.

The first test was to see if we were able to at least hit the same numbers as in our Barton 2500+ review. This proved to be no problem, as the NF7-S didn't flinch at all at 12x200. Keeping the multiplier at 12, I started moving the FSB upwards, adjusting the voltage as needed until we reached the ceiling of 208.

This was an ok result, given the high multiplier, so we dropped down to 10.5. The end result was 240FSB, but it wouldn't be anything I'd call stable. Our vCore was running along at 1.9v, so I lowered the FSB until we reached what I would call acceptable stability (run benchmarks, run Prime95 overnight without lockups). We settled on a 237FSB, which is 2488MHz.

Since we've probably reached the limits of our processor, we then lowered the multiplier to 9.5. Ram timings were kept tight, but we had to adjust our divider to 5/4 (400FSB end result). Moving the FSB upwards again, we landed on a final overclock of 9.5x245. I did manage 9x250, but the stability wasn't the greatest.

Lowering to 8x250 didn't seem to help much either. Unfortunently, it was either 250FSB or 245FSB, as the BIOS has nothing in between.

Our results were much better this time around, and the revision 2.0 PCB further cements ABIT's reputation as an overclocker's friend.

Test Setup

ABIT NF7-S nForce2: Barton 2500+, 2 x 256MB Corsair TWINX PC3200 Ram, ATi AiW Radeon 9700 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, nForce 2 Unified Driver Package 2.03, ATi Catalyst 3.4.

ABIT NF7-M nForce2: Barton 2500+, 2 x 256MB Corsair TWINX PC3200 Ram, ATi AiW Radeon 9700 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, nForce 2 Unified Driver Package 2.03, ATi Catalyst 3.4.

Test software will be:

SiSoft Sandra 2003
PC Mark 2002
PiFast
3D Mark 2003
Unreal Tournament 2003 CPU Tests
Quake 3: Arena

I'm aware that the two ABIT boards are different models, but we factored out the IGP component of the NF7-M by using the AiW 9700 Pro, and we're not using the SATA RAID for the hard drives on the NF7-S. This will hopefully give us as close to apples to apples between the two PCB revisions.