Closer Look: PCB Design

The first thing to catch my eye in NF7-S is an additional 12V power connector, which is a rare guest in mainboards for AMD processors. It’s evidently put here to increase system stability at high frequencies. By the way, the power connectors are placed quite smartly, although this largely depends on the chassis. But if you install NF7-S into an ordinary tower case, there should be no problems with power cables: they would go along one side of the mainboard, not hindering the airflow in the case. The FDD connector is also very conveniently located from this point of view.

It seems to me that the DIMM slots are very nicely located. There is enough space between the first two DIMM slots, so that you can easily install memory modules with heatsinks and there will still remain some room for proper air circulation (the third DIMM slot is quite far on all nForce2 boards). Moreover, the installed graphics card doesn’t lock DIMM slots’ clips. This allows installing and removing memory modules without uninstalling the graphics card from the AGP slot. To be more exact, it is actually a little hard to completely open the clips, however, it doesn’t prevent you from installing or moving away the memory modules. Besides, the problem arises only if the graphics card is really big (like NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti, for instance). If you use ATI RADEON 9700 Pro based solution, there is no problem at all.

Among the advantages of the mainboard we should also mention that there is enough space around the CPU socket to install large cooling systems.

Well, we have already mentioned the major highs of the product design, now, let’s pass over to disadvantages. First thing we didn’t like was the too small space left between the AGP slot (to be exact, the line continuing it) and the second IDE connector. As a result, the capacitors of a long graphics card (we used a GeForce4 Ti4400 reference-card) may hinder the connection of the IDE cable. If the capacitors were just a little bigger, it would be impossible at all to work with this connector. And once again, this problem arises only when you install a long graphics card.

We also didn’t like the location of the FPIO2 connector. The Media XP device is supposed to be in a 5”-bay at the front part of the chassis, so what’s the point of placing its connector at the back of the mainboard? As a result, the Media XP cable goes through the whole case, and it may cause some problems even though it is not very broad.

It also struck us as very strange how the connectors for the FireWire bracket were laid out. To be more exact, the problem lies not with the actual connectors but with the cables, which are too long: you have to wrap them into a loop, because they are twice as long as you need. As a result, this loop may accidentally get into the graphics card’s cooler. And if you put the FireWire bracket a few slots away, the cables hinder the installation of PCI cards.

We don’t quite understand also why there are no mounting holes around the CPU socket. This may make it impossible to install some cooling systems, like massive Swiftech-like coolers or some water cooling solutions.

CPU power supply scheme is three-phase and impulse. It’s based on the popular HIP6301 chip. Three-phase CPU power supply solution is a standard thing in mainboards for overclocking (although ABIT has also released a mainboard with a four-phase scheme). The memory in NF7-S is powered by an independent linear regulator.

Unfortunately, the temperature data is not received from the thermal diode integrated into the processor, but is measured by the mainboard’s thermal diode that is pressed to the bottom of the CPU. This somewhat lowers the accuracy of the thermal data and increases the lag of the thermal diode.