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After some absence of ABit products here, we are back with looking at the nForce2 chipset-based NF7-S. Built around the SPP / MCP-T combination of core logic on a salmon-colored PCB, the NF7-S has quite a bit to offer, from a three-phase power supply to a 5-bit multiplier selector and the bundling of the SATA to PATA adapter dubbed a Serillel converter.

The layout of the NF7-S has some unique features as well, from the omission of the first PCI slot to pushing out of the DIMM slots to the far right periphery of the PCB, which clears the AGP area but interferes in some housings with the mounting of any hard disk drive. Overall, the experience with the NF7-S could not have been much more pleasant, in some cases, the board exceeded our expectations. We further have some details on the controversy regarding the DIMM slot mapping to the individual memory controllers as well as the alleged bus threshold of 333 MHz FSB Athlon processors.

It has been awhile since we last reviewed any ABit product, to be precise, the BH6 was the last one. That does not mean that we did not test any ABit products or talked to the company, in fact, we did both quite extensively but that is another story. In any case, there are a few untold stories that shall remain untold.

The active cooler is extremely quiet (even more so when powered down)

Running the risk of being somewhat redundant, the currently best-performing Socket A chipset is without any doubt the nVidia nForce2 chipset. We have looked at a few boards so far and from the budget-oriented Soltek SL-75FRN L to the ASUS A7N8X standard and Deluxe, they all showed solid performance and stability. In terms of layout and features, each board we looked at so far has been different, that is, we have seen the MCP and the MCP-T with SoundStorm and dual LAN, we have seen firewire and USB 2.0 and last not least, different colored PCBs and expansion slots.

One major difference compared to the original nForce chipset is the completely redesigned System Platform Processor (SPP) with its integrated two memory controllers, tied together by the arbiter and using speculative preprocessing to anticipate upcoming workloads / prefetch the relevant data. Moreover, the physical layout of the memory channel mapping has changed, in that the original nForce reference designs had a 1+2 slot scheme. That means that the first DIMM slot had the exclusive mapping to one of the controllers with Slots 2 and 3 sharing the second one.

With the migration from PC1600 to PC3200 it has been a logical step to reverse the order of exclusive vs. shared DIMM slots for the simple reason that timing control of the more proximal slots is easier (which potentially offsets the problems of sharing) so that now the farthest DIMM slot (a.k.a. #3) is the one that is exclusive. That also means that in order to run in dual channel mode, it is necessary to fill DIMM slot #3 AND one of the two other slots. The simplest way of describing the correct configuration is to recommend filling the DIMM slots in reverse order, that is, starting at #3. The main reason why we go over this again is that there is still some confusion regarding this matter and we'll show later where some of this confusion originates along with the relevant benchmarks to document the performance impact of wrong DIMM configurations.

The NF7 Family

For now, we go back to the topic of this review, that is, the Abit NF7-S, which sports a few rare features like a 3 phase VRM and onboard firewire but only a single Ethernet port. Probably the most unique feature of the board though is its color, which is somewhat salmon. Like it or not but it is unique. What else does the NF7 have to offer? Let's dig right in.

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