Abit is highly regarded in the enthusiast community as one of the best overclocking motherboard manufacturers on the market. They are also one of the most innovative mainstream motherboard manufacturers. They were the first to introduce a jumper-free environment, a tweakable BIOS, 3-phase power, and a legacy free board design.

Currently, Abit offers three variations of the nForce 2. The Abit NF7-M we'll be reviewing today includes the nForce 2 Integrated Graphics Processor (IGP), and is based on the 1.2 Revision PCB. How will it stack up against the other nForce 2s we've reviewed previously? That's what we're here to find out.

Specifications

CPU: Supports AMD-K7 Athlon/ AthlonXP/ Barton FSB 200/266/333MHz Processors
Chipset: NVIDIA nForce2 IGP chipset with MCP
Dual DDR: Dual DDR architecture combines two independent 64-bit memory controllers
Memory: Three 184-pin DIMM sockets
VGA: Integrated GeForce4 MX AGP Graphics
Audio: 6-Channel AC 97 CODEC on board
LAN: On board 10/10M LAN Physical layer interface

System BIOS: SoftMenu™ Technology

Internal I/O Connectors

1 AGP, 5 PCI slots
Floppy Port supports up to 2.88 MB
2 x Ultra DMA 33/66/100/133 Connectors
1 x CD-IN, 1 x IrDA

Back Panel I/O
1 x PS/2 Keyboard, 1 x PS/2 mouse
1 x Serial, 1 x VGA connector, 1 x Parallel
1 x S/P DIF Output
Audio connectors (Front Speaker, Line-in, Mic-in, Center/Sub, Surround Speaker)
2 x USB, 1 x RJ-45 LAN Connector

Miscellaneous
ATX form factor
Hardware monitoring- Including Fan speed, Voltages, System environment temperature

The setup is pretty standard fare for the nForce 2, but be aware that this board comes with the nForce 2 MCP, and not the MCP-T. I'll explain why this is relevant later on.

The motherboard ships in Abit's typical red, black and white box. Inside, you'll find the motherboard, as well as the usual items they package. There is one IDE and one floppy cable, the manual, a USB bracket, a driver CD, and a back I/O bracket in case your current one lacks the cutouts needed for the NF7-M.

The Abit NF7-M

The Abit NF7-M is based on the newer revision 1.2 PCB. There are several changes made to it that addresses the concerns enthusiasts had when the first Abit nForce 2 motherboards were released, which I'll point out during the course of the review. The board itself is laid out well, and has an orange tint to it, making it something worth showing off if you have a case window.

The CPU socket is one of the first things Abit addressed with the v1.2 PCB. Previously, following AMD's specifications, there were no heatsink mounting holes around it. This was a problem for owners of some water setups, as well as owners of Swiftech and Alpha heatsinks since there was no way to install them. This has now been corrected, and considering the enthusiast market that Abit targets, it is a wise move on their part.

That is not to say that there aren't quality heatsinks that use a regular clip. The problem with most of these heatsinks though, is that the clips are sometimes hard to work with. There have been times where I've slipped and gauged the motherboard PCB, but in the case of the NF7-M, there are a couple of protective strips to shield the PCB from your screwdriver.

Although the four mounting holes are a welcome addition, there is a problem with setups that use large mounting screws for installation. Near the keyed area of the socket, there's a chip that may interfere with the mounting installation. At this time, I have no idea what mounting mechanism may make contact with the chip, though the tools included with the Swiftech MCX462+ didn't pose any problems.

Moving along, we get a look at the capacitor and power layout. About the capacitors, these are Rubycon capacitors, which are of very high quality. There was a thread in our forums regarding cheap capacitors, and it's a nice touch by Abit to spend a little more on maintaining a stable environment. The NF7-M also uses Abit's 3 Phase Power Solution, which will provide cleaner power to your CPU and subsystem. When it comes down to overclocking, this will be a major plus since clean power goes a long way towards a stable OC environment.

The power connections aren't in our favorite spot at all. The location will require you to do some routing to keep the power cables out of the way of the CPU heatsink and fan. What Abit did do right was to provide ample space between them so that disconnecting the power would not be too troublesome for those with large hands. As with our last nF2 we reviewed, the 12v Aux power connection is present to provide additional power to the CPU.

The nForce 2 IGP uses a heatsink and fan combination for cooling. Given the duties of the chipset, additional cooling made sense. Abit was a little sloppy with the thermal compound though, but we cleaned it off and reapplied it. The noise levels were near inaudible, but if you're concerned about more noise, your case fans will easily be louder.

One AGP and five PCI slots are available for your expansion needs. Given the number of integrated features, there are more than enough PCI slots. The AGP slot is something we have a problem with though, as it is lined up with the edge of the DIMM slots. This will present problems with owners of large video cards who need to change, or add/remove ram. With a Ti4600, it was necessary to remove it while doing some ram changes, though this was not required with the shorter 9700 Pro.

The NF7-M supports PC1600 DDR and up, however, we did encounter serious issues with our Corsair TWINX kit and the NF7-M. When we put the PC together, I dropped in a couple of sticks of TWINX, and was met with a series of steady beeps. At first, I thought my ram was dead, but it seems our buddies at OCAddiction had similar issues. I suggest you to get the full story, but in a nutshell you should download the , if you have a pre-v1.6 BIOS, that resolves this problem, as well as some of the BIOS corruption issues that have plagued many nForce 2 boards. I'll get more into this on the next page.

The NF7-M uses the MCP Southbridge. I touched on this earlier, but this particular board does not have SoundStorm support. Fact is, even with the required hardware, the MCP lacks the chipset features to support it.

There are a couple of IDE connections for your hard drive and optical drives. Unlike the NF7-S, there is no SATA support, but you can see the cutouts on the PCB where it should be. Given the additional costs of the IGP, it was probably a smart move on Abit's part to keep the costs from being too prohibitive.

The CMOS jumper and battery are nearby. What I like about this jumper is that it's extended to make grabbing it a lot easier. Considering how small jumpers are, and how often I drop them, this is a nice touch because it's a frikken pain in the neck fishing for a jumper when it falls out of your hands. Yeah, it's the little things that get to me.

There are a couple of chips of note that enables the nForce 2 sound and LAN features. The Realtek RTL8201BL is the physical interface for networking. Basically, the nForce2 MAC handles the first four networking layers, and the Realtek controller is the Physical Layer (PHY). It provides the connectivity for the nForce2 MAC, which in turn, handles the traffic. The Realtek ALC650 is the Digital to Analog Converter (DAC) for the nForce2 APU. The nForce2 APU does the work of processing the sound, and the ALC650 (which supports 5.1 output) converts that into an analog signal for your speakers.

Finally, we have the back I/O panel. Given that there is only one bracket included for USB, almost everything else will be located here. There are a couple USB ports, a LAN port, PS/2, sound and VGA.

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.