Just a few months ago, NVIDIA pushed VIA aside as the performance leader of chipsets for the Athlon XP family of processors. NVIDIA’s first foray into the motherboard chipset world came with the original nForce. This chipset was no slouch, yet it did not bowl over the market very long as VIA quickly took back the performance crown with the release of the KT333. VIA not only matched NVIDIA in performance but they were able to add features unmatched by NVIDIA until the release of the nForce2 board last winter. Now the situation has changed as VIA has been unable to reach the bar set by the nForce2 for some months now.

With the nForce2, NVIDIA brought dual channel memory support that boosts the performance of the Athlon XP CPU beyond that of previous chipsets. Along with the dual channel architecture, NVIDIA gave the nForce2 support for 400MHz DDR. With this memory bus, the chipset would also allow the frontside bus (FSB) to increase to 400MHz. The only problem was the 400MHz FSB speed became unstable for many Athlon XP processors; therefore, NVIDIA found it necessary to release a new revision of the nForce2 with the new 400MHz FSB processors from AMD hitting the streets.

The new nForce2 chipset comes in two flavors. First is the nForce2 Ultra 400 that incorporates dual 400MHz DDR controllers, an optimized 128-bit architecture, and 400MHz FSB support. The NVIDIA nForce2 400 relies on a single 64-bit memory channel to deliver 400 MHz FSB and 400MHz DDR performance geared for the budget market. Some motherboard manufacturers may give the new chipset revision different names in their product lines. Whether they call it the nForce2 Revision 2.0 or the nForce2 Ultra 400, they are one in the same.

With this new revision of the nForce2 chipset, NVIDIA has once again upped the ante in providing chipsets for the Athlon XP CPU. AMD released their new Athlon XP 3200+ last month and NVIDIA at the time was the only chipset to support this new CPU. The reason is the 400MHz FSB of this new CPU. Of course, VIA quickly announced the KT600 chipset that will support this CPU, but until it hits the streets the only way to run the 400MHz FSB Athlon CPU is with an nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboard.
 

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With the NF7-S, ABIT does not really break away too far from the norm. This is not a bad thing though. The layout of the motherboard is very clean as seen near the CPU socket. The capacitors are arranged in such as way as to give ample room for installation of some rather large heatsinks.

The NF7-S has a rather aggressive appearance. Sporting a red PCB and a stainless steel looking fan cooling the nForce2 chipset, most users will be well pleased with the looks of this board. This is a welcome change from the ABIT KD7, which was rather plain looking with its brown PCB.

Looking at the back panel reveals part of what gives this nForce2-enabled motherboard its appeal. The Audio Processing Unit (APU) driving the NF7-S allows the outside world to plug in via the S/PDIF Out, Front Speaker, Line-in, Mic-in, Center/Sub, and Surround Speaker connections. With the nForce2 MCP-T, the APU delivers Dolby Digital 5.1 cinematic-quality sound and 3D positional audio to your PC. With Soundstorm™ technology, the NF7-S supports Real-time audio encoding delivering up to 256 simultaneous audio streams.

The NF7-S supports 3GB of memory plugged into the 3 DIMM sockets. In order to take advantage of the bandwidth of the dual-channel memory subsystem built in to the nForce2, you are required to use two identical DIMM modules plugged into DIMM3 and DIMM2. When running at DDR400 speeds, the 128-bit memory controller integrated on chip provides up to 6.4 GB/sec bandwidth for system memory.

Another major difference in the NF7 and the NF7-S is the support for RAID on the NF7-S. ABIT chose to use the Silicon Image SIL3112A Controller for RAID support on the NF7-S. The NF7-S supports RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations. To use the RAID functionality, you must plug in a Serial Hard Drive into each of the onboard SATA connectors, since SATA will be a point-to-point protocol. Serial Hard Drives will allow you to make use of the 150 MB/s burst speeds provided by the new SATA bus.

For media buffs, you can plug into the NF7-S via Firewire (IEEE 1394a) and USB 2.0 connections. ABIT equips the NF7-S with a bracket that has two Firewire ports. Along with two connections on the back panel and four on another bracket that plugs into the two USB headers on the motherboard, there are six USB connections for the NF7-S all together.

The ABIT NF7-S provides one built-in LAN controller. Normally one is considered normal, but last year ASUS changed that for the Socket A platform by raising the bar and providing their A7N8X Deluxe motherboard with two onboard LAN controllers. With many users taking advantage of the Broadband connections, the extra LAN connection can be very helpful.