Review: ABIT NV7-133R

I'm a big fan of this board for a few reasons. nForce is a good chipset technically, the performance is strong and the MCP is quite excellent providing, in all the nForce boards I've looked at so far, an excellent audio and Ethernet solution. I'm a big fan of the nForce audio and it beats even the CMI 87xx series processors for an onboard solution and on my playback hardware, is just as good as my Audigy.

The NV7-133R offers good expansion and base features with IDE RAID, USB 2.0 for those new devices and onboard Ethernet and audio. All that's needed after that for say a high performance video editing workstation is a Firewire card for your DV equipment and your graphics card and you are all set. You have IDE RAID for your scratch storage, high speed serial connectivity in USB 2.0 and a high performance, stable AMD DDR chipset.

It does have some drawbacks but mainly for the overclockers in the audience. I couldn't overclock this board at all over 140MHz. It just wasn't happening and I've seen the same issues on all the other nForce boards I've seen. Apart from that, there isn't much to complain about.

You get the optical audio hardware and the connectors for the other audio channels this time, unlike with NV7m and you get a pair of USB 2.0 ports to round things off.

A good package, targetted at a certain market of people. Not an overclockers board but with lots of other strengths to stop it falling by the wayside.

It's not that cheap but considering the quality of the on-board components, you get a lot for your money.

Pro's

Excellent stock performance
On-board audio that is outstanding
Hardware Dolby Digital processing
On-board Ethernet
Good expansion

Con's

You can't overclock it well at all
Not that cheap