The NF7-S v2.0 is the fourth revision of this board. Each board getting better than the last. The specifications will be for the 2.0 revision so be careful when buying this board that you get the brand new 2.0 version if you need the extra features. Abit renowned for being leaders in overclocking motherboards in VIA and Intel Chipsets have set their sights on the nForce chipsets as well. Keeping in touch with each revision of this chipset.

nForce 2 Ultra 400

Nvidia's new revision of their Nforce 2 as you would expect has been tweaked a little to provide better performance and better support for the latest CPU's. I am referring here to the Athlon XP Barton core. This Chipset supports all the current FSB speeds from 100Mhz for the the Duron all the way to 200Mhz for the top end Barton CPU's. Its also Dual Data Rate so the effective Bus speeds can be anything up to 400Mhz. Hence the name Ultra-400.

Motherboard Features

AGP 8x

Firstly it has AGP 8x support so you can fully utilize those latest graphics cards such as the Geforce FX and the Radeon 9800. This provides an AGP bus bandwidth of 2.1Gb/s instead of the 1.1Gb/s provided with the AGP 4x specification. With more and more complex textures coming into games the AGP bus speed is getting more and more important all the time as On-Card memory is not large enough to handle everything.

DDR400

The current fastest memory available DDR400. DDR400 also known as PC3200. DDR400 provides a 200Mhz*2 memory system. Remember the days of PC100. Only 2 banks of DDR400 can be used though with a max of 2Gb. Should really be enough though. Only problem is that without upgrade you wont be able to go beyond 2Gb without using the slower memory. No problem for anyone other than people looking to run a network server or something similar.

The Abit NF7-S uses a Dual DDR400 system which incorporates two independent memory controllers

USB 2.0

USB 2.0 is up to 40 times faster than the standard USB1.1 ports. This is great news if you are using external Hard Disks CD-Drives or scanning large pictures on a USB scanner. with 480Mbs transfer rate there will be no slow down is your USB transmission.

Serial ATA 150 Converter

The Serial ATA converter allows you to use the Serial ATA technology with your current ATA 100/13 parallel devices.

5bit FID (Frequency ID)

By ABIT 5-bits FID Override technology, users can get variety of CPU over-clocking sets.
ABIT CPU H.T.P (Hardware Thermal Protection)
ABIT CPU H.T.P. uses pure hardware detection, which not like others use software detection to prevent CPU overheating. ABIT CPU H.T.P provides more reliable result for customers' investment.

Now that DDR400 has become a standard and has better compatibility looking at these DDR 400 is a good idea. This Abit board supports all socket A CPU's from the Duron up to the Barton core Athlon XP. The Abit board has its own advantages over some of the other boards. SoftMenu of course we say it time after time, but if your into overclocking then this is the perfect feature for you. The NF7-S also comes with hardware thermal protection to protect you against heat related damage to your CPU. And finally you get a 5.1 Dolby digital receiver built in as well as an onboard audio chip that gives you 6 channel audio without the need for an expensive audio card. A good package again from Abit, and a great chipset from Nvidia. Its fairly new and I have heard of no major problems. Also performs fairly well in the benchmarks (see links).

Useful Links