Wednesaday, April 02, 2003

Introduction

Always very quick to respond to the market, Abit never takes a long time before to produce new mainboards to follow up the tendancies such has the new NF7-M based on the brand new nVidia chipset.

Available on many different versions, some of the NF7 models are including a serial ATA controler and a graphic controler as well.

The version that we will be testing is the NF7-M wich doesn'T have a serial ATA controler but is including a GeForce 4 MX graphic video card.

Based on NVIDIA's nForce2 SPP with MCP-2T chipset, this mainboard support 133Mhz FSB processors as well as DDR400 memory in Dual channel configuration.

Support of the AGP 8X graphic cards is of course taken care of by the chipset.

Finally, a LAN 10/100 controller is also included onboard with a 6 channel soundcard of the Soundstorm rendition supporting Digital Dolby 5.1.

The configuration

The NF7-M has very few jumpers and none of them is in direct relation with the CPU.

Thus, once all the hardware is installed, all that need to be done is a quick visit to the BIOS to accomplish the last configuration steps.

Int he Soft Menu III, we can chage the the procesor FSB between 100Mhz and 237Mhz.

While we're there, we can also make many other changes such change the processor Vcore voltage, set the memory bus frequency at 200/266/333/400Mhz, change the AGP/PCI frequencies and change the DDR or AGP voltage as well.

MAny memory timings can be changed from the Advanced Chipset Features menu.

Next: Technical details

Abit NF7-M