i have 2 of the rev1.1 NF7-s boards, both are excellent thus far, and have the missing mounting holes for the CPU cooler.

both boards are run using an XP2100+ at 2000/200, and have been pushed to 2100/200 with no problems.

well recommended

REMF

A few Points for the readers of the review:

- If you buy an NF7-S, make sure it's revision 1.2 or later - better overclocking features, changes in board layout (mounting holes for example), etc. The NF7-S in this review is an older version.

- Not sure about world-wide availability but I know that the Western Digital Raptor Serial ATA drive is ETA 4/5/2003 at http://www.widgetsinc.com.

- The abscence of IDE RAID is true for ALL nforce2 boards. Converters
are needed.

- The Third dimm slot is far away from the other two (close together). The third dimm slot makes up one channel while the other two dimm slots make up the 2nd channel. That may explain the distance between them.

- If you're an extreme overclocker, you know to get an Abit NF7-S revision 1.2 or later.

I have the first revision of this board and am very happy with it.

The onboard sound is the Nvidia Soundstorm not the Realtek codec talked about here.. or is this the same thing?

You say "The CPU multiplier can be changed from 5 to 22. Looks impressive, although hardly useful" well I have found a very good use for it with my 133FSB Athlon XP2200 drop the multiplier to 11 and up the FSB to 166 giving a mild overclock of the processor to 1826mhz (xp2200 runs 1800mhz)*. Not much good? Well the extra bandwidth comes in kind of useful ;-)

I do a lot of Bryce work with complex scenes and the faster memory really helps when loading the scenes (up to 30% faster). Being as Bryce 5 appears to be very sensitive to overclocked processors being able to keep the overclock of the processor to a minimum is great. Photoshop also seems to be quite a bit faster.

When the 333/400 Athlons are at a reasonable price point I am sure the 237FSB and multiplier adjustment will come in useful then too!

*NB you need one of the unlocked Thoroughbred processors to do this easily.

Why didn't you see if sync mode could overclock higher with CAS set to 2.5? The memory you were using is only rated for CAS2 at 200 MHz. The memory, rather than the motherboard, may have been the factor that limited the FSB.

Also I'd like to know the maximum synchronous FSB with 1.5 and 1.6 chipset voltage.

You can get some real info from the people at
http://forum.abit-usa.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=26
and a good review here
http://www.extremeoverclocking.com/reviews/motherboards/AB IT_NF7_v2.0_11.html

Dan

I've had this mainboard for a year now and its been great. especcially for overclocking and aslong as you have a good cpu fan

I have 5 of the ABIT NF7 motherboards and I really like them. I have one problem, when I try to use a signature pad on COM1 of the motherboard it does work. This same signature pad does work on an old Dell 166 and most of the new computers I have in my shop.

Thanks for any help you can provide!!!!

i just got me a bit nf7s , but seems like i cant get is to work with power supplies more than 350...