Layout and features
ABIT have experimented with layouts and PCB colours recently. It seems as if the older, generic-coloured PCB is here to stay; the IT7-MAX2 was a short-lived departure. As you can no doubt see from the above picture, it's a busy motherboard all around. The first aspect that most will pickup on is the departure of the holes surrounding the ZIFF socket. Although they've been dropped from AMD's official motherboard specifications, some manufacturers still persist with them. They allow one to mount larger coolers for better air cooling. For most, though, it will be of no great importance. I like the fact that ABIT have included strips on either side of the socket to stop errant screwdrivers damaging the PCB whilst installing a sturdy heatsink. Power is regulated via an advanced 3-phase power supply. A decent power source and regulation is essential for stability once overclocked.
The signature 3 DDR banks are well located on the side. The floppy port is in a sensible location, too. Some manufacturers are opting for passive Northbridge heatsinks, but ABIT have included a stylish ORBish cooler. With FSBs in BIOS up to 237, it makes a deal of sense. Underneath, the nForce2 SPP supports dual-channel DDR400 (6.4GB/s), 8x AGP, 3GB of system RAM, official support for upcoming XP processors, and a 800MB/s Hypertransport link to the Southbridge.
RAID is provided in Serial ATA form only. Silicon Image's SIL3112A controller sits below the NF7-S sticker. It can run your hard drives in RAID0 or RAID 1, assuming you have either the requisite SATA drives or 2 ABIT Serrilel converters. ABIT, to their credit, do bundle one such converter with the NF7-S. By having to convert, you're kind of defeating the object of the exercise. We hope to see true SATA drives appear in the near future. I'd have appreciated ABIT's excellent debug LCD feature here.
The all-singing, all-dancing, NVIDIA nForce2 MCP-T Southbridge features, amongst other things, support for 6 USB2.0 ports, 2 integrated LANs (NVIDIA and 3COM), 6 PCI slots, 6-channel sound via the impressive NVIDIA APU, Firewire support, and ATA133 operation. Pretty good, huh ?. That takes away the need for separate controllers. The 800MB/s link on offer between bridges should be well used here. ABIT have specified 5 PCI slots on this particular model.
Kind of difficult to see from the above picture due to their tiny size, 3 Realtek physical interfaces sit around the 8x AGP port. The ALC650 (6-channel sound, bottom left), RTL8201B (10/100 LAN, middle), and RTL8801B (Firewire, right). Why are these here when we have all of these features integrated from the MCP-T ?. The reason lies in the fact that the NVIDIA features need physical routing to the ports that they work from. What that means is that no Realtek chips will show up in your device manager - they're just there to ensure that the features are routed properly to the headers and backplane.
The NF7-S is 'Soundstorm' compliant What that means to you and me is that it features 6-channel sound, the ability to decode a Dolby digital signal in real time, and the ability to output it via an optical-out jack (S/PDIF). You can see that on the backplane, along with the NVIDIA 10/100 LAN and 2 USB2.0 ports. A further 4 USB2.0 ports are available by headers, as are 3 Firewire ports. ABIT's Media XP is supported too.
