The NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400 will be officially announced together with the Athlon XP processors supporting 400MHz bus. So, there is not so much waiting left now.

New nForce2 Ultra 400 revisions are marked anew.
The first nForce2 officially supporting 400MHz bus is marked as A1.

As you can see from the photo, it is very easy to distinguish between the old chipsets and the new ones with the official support of 400MHz bus, even though there is no Ultra 400 marking. For example, NVIDIA doesn’t use the metal cover for the chipset anymore, which used to be typical of older nForce2 SPP.

The software utilities recognize the new
nForce2 revision as C1.

This way, the major distinguishing feature of ABIT NF7 2.0 from the earlier board revisions is the full official support of Socket A processors with 400MHz bus. In fact, this is why ABIT NF7 2.0 uses a new BIOS version.

Besides the newer chipset used in the today’s ABIT NF7 2.0, which allows ABIT to claim that their product is compatible with the CPUs supporting 400MHz bus, there is a number of other peculiarities, which distinguish it from the predecessors (in fact, they appeared in Revision 1.2 already):

• Much richer options for voltage management of various system parts. Vcore can be increased up to 2.3V, Vdimm – up to 2.9V. The mainboards with revisions below 1.2 the maximum Vcore equaled 1.85V and max Vdimm – 2.7V. The maximum chipset voltage remained the same: 1.7V.
• ABIT NF7 2.0 supports CPU Bus Disconnect, which allows reducing the CPU temperature in idle state quite significantly. Read more about this function here.
• The CPU voltage regulator has been slightly changed. Although the power supply scheme retained all three phases, there are fewer capacitors used now and the capacitors themselves are different.

Although there are fewer capacitors now,
the mainboard retained its high stability.

• ABIT NF7 2.0 is equipped with two LEDs located in the lower left corner of the PCB. They indicate if the mainboard is powered or not. And next to the power supply connector there4 is a new jumper, which function is still unknown to us.

This way, ABIT NF7 2.0 has now become even better for Socket A processors overclocking.

Overclocker’s dream: ABIT NF7 2.0!

Overclocking

Well, let’s check how high we can raise the FSB frequency on ABIT NF7 2.0. in this test we will see how the PCB design change and the new chipset version affected the overclocking potential of this mainboard. In this case we were mostly interested in overclocking the mainboard in the maximum performance mode that is when the FSB and the memory worked synchronously. Moreover, the memory worked in dual-channel mode. The nForce2 based mainboards are known to be showing their maximum performance in this particular situation, however, the working frequencies are not as high as in asynchronous mode.  For example, in our previous test session of ABIT NF7 Rev. 1.0 we managed to increase the FSB and memory frequencies only up to 212MHz.

Today we used a very well-overclockable Athlon XP 1700+, with the clock multiplier set to 8x. Like in the previous cases we didn’t modify the mainboard in any way, the chipset voltage was equal to 1.6V, the Vcore and Vdimm remained nominal. After a set of long-lasting experiments with the FSB frequency we managed to overcome the previous record. The FSB frequency, which we achieved this time without losing stability equaled 225MHz, which makes 450MHz of the effective frequency taking into account the DDR protocol of Athlon XP bus. Not bad, really.

CPUs with 400MHz bus will definitely have
no problems at work, no doubt.