Performance

Before turning to the actual benchmarks results, we would like to point out the following: mainboards based on the same chipset don’t greatly differ in performance. So when choosing a specific mainboard, the most important things are rich features set, overclocking-friendly options, stability and reliability, and technical support rather than the board’s actual performance in benchmarks.

We ran the tests on the following testbed:

• AMD Athlon XP 2600+ CPU (166x12.5);
• ABIT NF7-S mainboards with ver1.3 BIOS;
• 2x256MB Corsair XMS3200C2 memory;
• NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4400 graphics card;
• Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 40GB HDD;
• Windows XP Professional;
• Detonator 30.82, nForce2 driver 2.00.

The memory was set to the sync mode with the FSB, timings being 2-2-2-5. The benchmarking results are listed below:

You see our testbed shows no striking slumps in performance. You can compare the results with those we obtained in our review of AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 2800+ and 2500+ on Barton Core.

Conclusion

Highs:

• Rich features;
• Excellent stability, also at the highest FSB frequency;
• Good overclockability in the sync mode;
• Dual-channel memory support.

Lows:

• No Parallel IDE RAID controller;
• The CPU temperature is not measured via the built-in CPU thermal diode;
• Some “peculiarities” of the memory and CPU voltages;
• Minor inconveniences in PCB design.

We guess the advantages weigh heavier, although, as usual, it’s up to you to decide. Overall, we recommend buying this mainboard for overclockers as well as for ordinary users who want to have a functional product. This mainboard won’t suit for extreme overclockers who like to stretch things to the limit. It won’t suit also for those who want to build up a RAID array of the drives available in the market so far.

ABIT NF7-S costs about $130.