SiSoftware Sandra 2003
Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and memory speeds.
CPU Arithmetic Benchmark
CPU Multimedia Benchmark
Both the NF7-M and NF7-S perform very closely with each other. The NF7-S does hold a slight lead, perhaps suggesting optimizations with the v2.0 PCB, but not enough for us to flat out state this as fact. Overclocked scores are truly impressive, and keep in mind we were unable to get anything near this with the v1.2 PCB.
Memory Benchmark
Pretty much a dead heat here. We did get some impressive memory scores though, with our TWINX running synchronous at 2-3-3-7.
PC Mark 2002
No change from v1.2 to v2.0.
PiFast
A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory.
Lower is Better
This is a real-world benchmark, and will stress the memory subsystem. No great change between the PCB revisions, though overclocked speeds scored our best PiFast results thus far.
3D Mark 2003, 1024x768 - Default
Although we prefer real-world benchmarks, 3D Mark will eat up a fair amount of processing power for its benchmarks.
No real difference again, but the NF7-S rev2.0 continues to lead the NF7-M for the majority of the benchmarks so far.
Unreal Tournament 2003
UT2K3 s a real system killer, and can bring many systems to its knees. We used the scripts written by , which are excellent tools in testing various resolutions and detail levels. We selected the CPU test...
It's a bit bigger difference between the two this time around, and after all the benchmarks we've ran today, it's looking like the Revision 2.0 PCB has been tweaked.
A better idea of the improvements between PCBs can be seen here, as the NF7-S has a higher low FPS and high FPS.
Quake 3 Arena, 640x480 - Fastest
It's getting old, I know, but Quake 3 is still a decent benchmark for almost anything. For motherboards and CPUs, we run at the lowest settings and fire away.
It's not a large difference, but the NF7-S ends up pulling out a win here.
Final Words
ABIT has taken a pretty good motherboard, and made it close to perfect. Then again, this is really their fourth try at it, so it's good to know their engineers are hard at work.
Thankfully, nothing was taken away with the latest revision, and we have all of the high-end nForce 2 features present, including Soundstorm. In my opinion, the sound quality and low CPU usage makes it good enough that you shouldn't even need an addon card. With the new SPP, we have support for the latest Bartons, future-proofing the NF7-S. If there is one knock I have is that despite supporting SATA RAID, ABIT only includes one Parallel-to-Serial adapter instead of two.
As impressive as the performance and overclocking was, it is the stability of the BIOS I am most satisfied with. No longer do I dread making tweaks in the BIOS, as the revision 2.0 PCB has proven to be very reliable during our overclocking experiments.
Pros: Great performance and stability. Overclocking ability was great and BIOS corruption issues are gone.
Cons: Only one Parallel-to-Serial adapter.
Bottom Line: Easily the fastest, and most reliable nForce 2 we've had the pleasure to work with. It's also reasonably priced, and makes this board a must have.
If you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.
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ABIT NF7-S Revison 2.0: The ABIT nForce 2 family gets another tweak to address some issues that have plagued the nForce 2 since the initial release. We take a look at the changes, as well as if there are any performance increases.
