Board cont'd

As I mentioned before, the memory slots are coloured green and purple which serve as an indication for installing ram in a Dual Channel configuration, one of the big selling points of nForce2 chipset motherboards. Some may find it confusing in that one would think that putting 2 sticks into the purple slots, and therefore keeping the colours the same would give you a Dual Channel configuration. This isn't the case however, as is explained in the manual you will need one in a purple slot and one in the green slot. I guess it all depends on how you think. I don't personally feel that anyone has come up with a satisfactory way of visually indicating this feature at a glance as yet.

In between the memory slots and the IDE connectors we find the southbridge or MCP-T chip just left of the battery and Clear CMOS jumper. This chip which supplies support for dual LAN, Firewire, up to 6 ports of USB 2.0 as well as ATA133 IDE, is covered with a green sticker showing off the fact that this board has official support for 400 FSB.

Moving down we find the 3 IDE connectors (just under the battery and Clear CMOS jumper), one of which is reserved for RAID as supplied by the Promise PDC20376 controller. This controller also gives us support for the 2 SATA headers, and it's possible to RAID both the SATA ports or one SATA and the Promise supplied IDE port. SATA hasn't as yet become mainstream but things are moving in that direction so inclusion of these two headers will help to future proof (if such a thing is possible) your motherboard somewhat. Having the IDE and SATA headers this low down is a great position as chances are this is where your Hard Drives are going to be found, in the lower half of your system. The floppy header is higher up on the board and should hopefully provide a bit of extra length in reaching the floppy drive in those systems that have it at the top rather than the bottom. Users of cases without removable motherboard trays might have a bit of a difficult time with the HDD LED header and its brethren, since they are right down at the bottom of the board, and just under IDE 1. This means you'll need to install those before putting in the IDE leads.

The back I/O panel has all the features that have become common nowadays. Starting from the left we have the 2 P/S2 ports for keyboard and mouse, followed by 2 of the USB 2.0 ports. Next are the Parallel and Serial ports, one of each although there is room for a second serial port. Not a big annoyance since the use of serial ports has dropped a lot in this age of USB. Next up are the LAN and 2 more USB ports, again of the USB 2.0 standard. And finally we find the sound jacks, as controlled by the Realtek ALC650 6-channel audio.

All in all, the board layout isn't bad apart from the power connectors, and overall looks fully featured (as it is) but not overly cramped.

Bios

The BIOS is once again of the Pheonix - Award BIOS which is personally my favourite. There are a lot of options here both for the general user and the avid enthusiast. All of the screens you have come to expect from this form of BIOS are present as well as here and there a few little gems and extras. System performance can be controlled from a 3 choice menu, and I suspect that these choices will dictate a minor overclock, unless on manual. If you do want to have a play you will have to set the System Performance tab to Manual or the options you will want will be 'greyed out'.

The CPU can also be set for either Normal or High Performance which basically means either having the CPU at the settings you have chosen or overclocking the FSB for another 7MHz. The CPU frequency goes all the way up to 250MHz FSB which is quite a way up the scale, although with Barton's now running 400 FSB it probably won't be long before even this scale won't be high enough for enthusiasts.

Memory settings are good, with the FSB/DRAM ratios having 8 different settings, allowing great flexibility in choosing how you want to set up your system, although most will know by now to run the system synchronously for best performance. There are also settings for four memory timings such as the CAS latency option. Like the CPU Frequency, if you want to have a play, you'll need to set the memory timings to manual and also here if you're not an overclocker you can choose between standard (By SPD) and high performance settings. AGP settings are also in this section with the memory timings, allowing you to control the AGP Fast Writes, 8x enable and Spread Spectrum.

There is one thing in the BIOS that I simply have to point out; Frequency and Voltages have there own menu. This is great in that the main overclocking options for serious tweakers are accessible from one menu. What isn't great though is the Core Voltage options. Like the rest of the bios it's easy enough to choose what voltage you want but the core voltage tops out at only 1.8v which for enthusiasts is low. DIMM voltage has 4 options to choose from, hardware, 1.5,1.6 and 1.7v.

All in all the BIOS is pretty damn good. I would have liked to have seen the CPU Multiplier in the same menu as the FSB and voltages, and would have liked a little extra on the Core voltage but I'm not going to hold it against the board considering my overclocking results.

Overclocking

Before we get straight into the overclocking nitty gritty, there is one thing I would like to point out. Slapping in our Barton 2500+ did NOT unlock the multipliers. I would guess that a BIOS update will fix this but no guarantees here, since our K7N2G-ILSR was the same way inclined. Until then, if you want to unlock your Barton you will have to do it the old fashioned way of bridging the L3 #5 bridge with some conductive paint (or whatever is your preferred method) where upon you'll be able to access multipliers of 13 and under.

were kind enough to send us a Barton 2500+ for this review based on the same core as the new 3200+'s so my hope was there would be a little bit of headroom here. I started with the FSB, jumping from 11x166 to 11x170, just to get the ball rolling. Naturally this was no problem at all. Indeed at 11x180 there was no indication of instability at all.

Feeling brave I increased the Multiplier to 11.5, so that now we had 11.5x180 for 2070MHz. Again no problems at all. Making jumps of 5 on the FSB I got to 11.5x185 for 2127MHz before I hit my first BSOD during testing. Extra voltage didn't help either so I lowered the voltage on the core back to 1.65v and the multiplier to give us 11x185 for 2035MHz. The system was running strong so increasing the FSB took us to 190 and past it to 200. Didn't seem to be any issues here either, still stable as a rock.

It wasn't till we got to 11x215 we got another BSOD during bootup of WindowsXP. Backing off to 11x210 in 1MHz increments and increasing voltage to 1.675v on the core got us stable again. At this point we lowered the Mulitplier down to 10.5, for a 10.5x 210 at which point we proceded to increase the FSB once again. By 10.5x 219 we still had no issues.

At 10.5x221 the K7N2 Delta-ILSR died on me. No amount of CMOS reset would bring it back to life. By now some of you will have read about this happening on nForce2 boards, and it's something we have had our share of here at the lair. However, there's also a little trick you can do to get the PC to boot up again, and that's install a 100FSB processor like a Duron. Not having one of these I was kind of stuck but MSI to the rescue! They saw fit to include a Jumper on the motherboard to hard select your FSB, so you can choose safe mode defaults at 100FSB or 133/166+. This is stated in the manual right next to the page on CMOS reset jumper, and explains that if the computer hangs on POST you should close this Jumper. Switching the jumper breathed new life into the motherboard and we were up and running again. Highest FSB I could get was at 10.5x219. Reducing the Multiplier, changing voltages or lowering the ram timing's didn't avail me any extra, which is fine because that's a pretty good overclock on its own.

I have to give a shout out to MSI here as I really thought the board was dead, but that little J10 jumper for the FSB was a great addition. How reliable it is, is another matter entirely but I've personally used it 3 times during testing without any problems.

Test Setup

MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR, AMD Barton 2500+ @ 10.5x219 (Supplied by ), 2 x 256MB Corsair TWINX PC3200 Ram, Gainward GeForce4 Ti4600, W&CC AMD WaterCooling Kit, 80GB Western Digital, Windows XP SP1.

ABIT NF7-S, AMD Barton 2500+, 2 x 256MB Corsair TWINX PC3200 Ram, Gainward GeForce4 Ti4600, 80GB Western Digital, Windows XP SP1.

Test software will be:

TMPGEnc AVI-to-MPG Encoding
2003 CPU Tests
Unreal Tournament 2003
Quake 3: Arena
Jedi Knight 2

Just a quick plug to for supplying us with the Barton 2500+ used for testing.