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While Abit have a snazzy box for their products, they aren't best known for their bundles and they carry on that dubious tradition here. The board, installation CD, manual, ATA and floppy cables and the extra I/O bracket we discussed earlier are all you get. Perfectly adequate and more than enough for most, just nothing extra to break the mould.
Presentation with the snazzy box raises an eyebrow but nothing more. It's debatable how excited you should get over a motherboard but when you see more than your fair share, it helps to get one that piques your interest.
BIOS and Manual
The BIOS, an Award 6.0, is an uneventful affair, as with NV7m. All the nForce solutions I've seen don't cater for the overclocker with NV7m being completely untweakable as far as front side bus and multiplier are concerned. The NV7-133R is equally neglected in the tweaking stakes, but not to the extreme that NV7m is.
You have CAS latency adjustment for the memory (2 and 2.5) and a pair of settings, Optimal and Aggressive. Optimal uses the SPD information on the memory module to set the memory timings while Aggressive sets 2-5-2 timings on the Samsung stick I used.
As far as front side bus speed adjustment goes, you have a few options. No 1MHz increments here. just a few spartan choices. Between 100MHz and 133MHz you have a few choices, mostly in the 10xMHz range. Above 133MHz, things get slightly more interesting with some selections all the way up to 157MHz.
You get an option to raise CPU voltage which increases default voltage by 0.05V which means 1.8V with an Athlon XP. Whether or not the other front side bus speeds actually work is another thing entirely as you'll see later!
No multiplier adjustment on the NV7-133R I'm afraid.
The manual is the usual Abit, easy to read and follow, affair. Nothing untoward and good quality as you'd expect.
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