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ABIT NF7 meets Granite Bay

Join the community - in the OCAU Forums! Date  17th April 2003 Author  Chainbolt Editor  James "Agg" Rolfe Manufacturer  ABIT Computer Corp. Overclocking, Conclusions OVERCLOCKING Initially the NF7 looked like a poor overclocker to us. We could not increase the CPU frequency by more than 100 MHz without getting BSOD or system crashes. We then found out that increasing the AGP voltage is very substantially reducing overclocking headroom. After setting back the AGP voltage to default, our 2400+ went up like a charm. The maximum possible frequency under whichever multiplier to FSB combination was for both NF7-S revisions an amazing 2450 MHz. We have to point out that we used the AMD stock HSF. Using a better HSF would undoubtedly result in even better results. At around 2450 MHz it was possible to boot into Windows XP and run a very few Sandra benchmarks but not our productivity benchmarks. Stability was given at around 2350 MHz with revision 1.0 and 2400 MHz with revision 1.2. The better overclocking stability we achieved with revision 1.2 is maybe the result of the changes in the circuitry, the capacitors and the mosfets. Many NF7 users are reporting even more impressive results Many aircooled XP 2100+ (1700MHz) are easily reaching 2300 MHz. The combination of such a relatively cheap AMD processor and an nForce 2 board is certainly a delightful and cost efficient overclocking pleasure. On the memory side, we could run NF7 revision 1.0 stable up to 205 MHz and revision 1.2 at 195 MHz with our Winbond DDR 400 chips based Twinmos PC3200 memory. These differences seem to be more random based than systematic. FSB 200 MHz is anyway dangerous territory as many users are reporting BIOS corruptions with their nForce 2 chipset based boards when running the front-side-bus frequency close or above 200 MHz. There are workarounds to avoid this problem which can occur when the user is trying to save a BIOS with an above 200 MHz FSB setting. But nonetheless we recommend the non-experienced user to be very careful in this regard or to use a second BIOS chip (“Bios Savior”) (info here) as fall-back in case the original BIOS becomes corrupted. Hopefully future BIOS revisions will solve this problem. The 1.7-volt maximum chipset voltage is not exactly regarded as sufficient for hardcore overclocking. It is of course possible to solder the board for a higher chipset voltage than the BIOS offers. Recently even a soldering free modification was discovered: It is obviously possible to increase the chipset voltage far beyond the maximum of 1.7 volt given in SoftMenu III by penciling a certain transistor as described in this how-to-do article. We have not tried this modification and recommend using it with extreme caution after having recently “burned” one Northbridge chip. Even though the NF7 Northbridge is actively cooled, it can already at 1.7 volt get pretty warm. Overclocking results between 500 MHz and 600 MHz on top of default frequency with air-cooling are amazing for AMD systems and certainly nothing to sneeze about. But we think that an E7205 system with a Pentium 4 2400 is still yielding a little more in the overclocking department. Our Pentium 2400 went stable with the almost silent P4 stock cooler up to 3240 MHz. This is not unusual for a C1 stepping P4 2400 and there are many reports about P4 2400 even reaching 3300 MHz stable and air-cooled. To reach the 3200+ level an AXP would have to run at least at 2800 MHz which seems aircooled not to be possible. We also have the feeling that looking at the above 200 MHz FSB corruption reports with nForce 2 based boards that the E7205 chipset is providing better stability under extreme overclocking conditions. CONCLUSIONS There wasn’t any major flaw with the initial NF7 revision. But there is almost nothing that couldn’t be improved. The most important NF7 improvements we have seen are the added mounting holes and the widened voltage options for the CPU and the memory. It looks like that the A3 Northbridge stepping is slightly improving performance and that the changes in the circuitry are providing better overclocking stability. Our tests showed that the tested ABIT NF7 revision 1.2 is performing similar to the compared Granite Bay (E7205) dual channel DDR Pentium 4 system. But there is no doubt that the NF7 is in terms of value for money a much superior choice to the tested E7205 chipset based system. ABIT’s NF7 is so competitively priced that we could buy 2 of them for 1 competing E7205 based mainboard. The NF7 is a well designed, well performing, easy to overclock mainboard with a very attractive sticker price. With continuous hardware revisions ABIT has brought the NF7 mainboard model line close to perfection. We absolutely recommend this product. It will be interesting to see how the NF7 compares with the next generation dual channel DDR Intel boards. Stay tuned for an upcoming dual channel DDR in-house comparison, with ABIT NF7 versus ABIT IC7-G. Check out the latest Gallery entries in the PC Database! << Back OCAU Main Page Select Page Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3 - Page 4 -

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