Mounting in an Antec Sonata

I mounted the Board in an Antec Sonata case. This case is awesome, and the Abit NF7-S v2.0 fits snuggly inside.

Now those of you with a keen eye may have noticed a few things here. Firstly, I haven’t pushed my CD-ROM drives back into the case at this point. It turned out I had to move the bottom CD-ROM up to the top slot, because it made contact with the FDD connector. If I disconnected the FDD connector, it went very close to making contact with the DIMMS. This is a bad flaw.

Also, you will notice, if you own one of these boards, that I have connected the firewire to the USB headers and the USB to the firewire. OOPS. No Damage was caused by this, but be careful. The Blue Connector is for USB and the Red Connectors are for Firewire.

Temperatures & Voltages

Ok, without any tweaking, this is the default MBM5 readouts after running the PC for days. These are effectively IDLE temps and voltages, with a Panaflo L1A fan on the CPU at 7v.
The ambient room temperature is 18c

That is an awesome result in comparison to the Asus A7v266. From here, I went to the BIOS and dropped the CPU Core voltage to 1.5v. I ran Prime95 for an hour to make sure all was stable, and MBM only reached 36°C under load. Prime95 doesn’t seem to hit the CPU as hard as an SVCD encode of a VOB file, so I tried that. The Temp maxed out at 34°C. At 1.5v the Idle temp is 26°C in ambient 18°C. So what does that all mean? This is a great board for people who want to undervolt their CPU core to reduce heat.

Conclusion

Drivers are simple, the nforce control panel is logical, and everything just works. And that is what I look for in a motherboard. For me Abit has dethroned Asus from the mantle of best board
manufacturer. The Abit NF7-S v2.0 can be purchased from Scorpion Technology for $225.

The Packaging

In Australia it is not easy at first glance to be sure you are getting a revision 2.0 Box when you buy this product, or take delivery.

Luckily the Crush18D is marked on the Identifier (CR18D). In the US this label explicitly has v2.0 written on it. Not here in Australia though.

The Accessories

Australia seems to have received slightly different accessories in comparison to every other review I have seen. Take particular note of the Faceplate. It has 2 USB and 2 Firewire on the one faceplate.
Every other review only had the USB on the faceplate.

D

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Board Layout

The Motherboard layout of the NF7-S v2.0 is pretty well done.

Things I like:
• Missing PCI Slot to the left of the AGP Slot
• Gap between the CPU Socket and the DIMMS
• Placement of the USB Headers
• The 4 CPU socket holes for Mounting Heatsinks or Waterblocks.
• The room around the socket for installing Large Heatsinks.
• CPU Socket Orientation
• Board protectors near Socket Lugs.

Things I dislike:
• Placement of the FDD Connector (Case specific issues)
• Placement of the Analog CD Audio Connector
• Placement of the Firewire Headers
• The northbridge is slightly too close to the CPU socket
• The Orientation of the IDE Connectors
• Placement of the DIMMS relative to the AGP Slot

If you read the above list you would think this board is a shocker. Quite the contrary is true though. It is very hard to design a perfect feature rich board, and Abit has made tradeoffs well. Even with all of my dislikes, I am still happily using this board in my Sonata case, and prefer it to my old Asus in terms of layout.

The Back Panel

This backpanel has everything you need. I sometimes wish that Abit had made the NF7-S v2.0 legacy free and removed the Serial and Parallel ports and replaced them with USB and Firewire. Abit have done this with some of their previous “legacy free” boards, and i think now is the time for them to consider it for ALL of their enthusiast boards. Why not have more USB and firewire on the back panel, and moe the serial and parallel to the Rear Faceplates?

Anyway, enough of a rant, you have Optical, all of your analog connectors, USB, LAN, what else do you need. Now I can hear some of the regular readers thinking “But it has a fan on the northbridge”. Well that is what we will address next.

Replacing the NorthBridge Fan

Ok, as always, tiny fans on a northbridge cause lots of noise, so before I go any further, off comes the fan, and replace it with a Zalman NJB32 Heatsink.

When I removed the fan, I noticed how thinly spread the thermal paste was. This fan wouldn’t have been very efficient anyway. Using a lint free cloth I removed the existing thermal paste, applied some Arctic Ceramique and slapped on the Zalman Northbridge Heatsink. Too easy. Looks a little close to the CPU socket though. Lets see how it goes with an SLK-800U.

A Thermalright SLK-800U

If you have read through some of my earlier articles you will have learned alot about the SLK-800U. This heatsink is copper based, weighs 500g and bolts through the motherboard. In earlier versions of the NF7-S Abit forgot to leave enough clearance around the mounting holes, meaning that some components were being shorted by the heatsink standoffs. No such problems with the v2.0. The holes were however very tight, and I had to exert quite a bit of force on one of the holes to get the standoffs through. No damage though, so all is good.

As you can see from the first picture, the SLK-800U doesn’t touch the capacitors near the CPU socket. It is a tight fit, but no touching or bending of capcitors occurred. The second picture is very telling. The Northbridge heatsink is now almost touching the CPU Heatsink. Not a major concern, as they don’t carry any charge, but if you are using passive northbridge cooling, you will be in a much tighter position with an SLK-900 which is bigger again.

Mounting in an Antec Sonata

I mounted the Board in an Antec Sonata case. This case is awesome, and the Abit NF7-S v2.0 fits snuggly inside.

Now those of you with a keen eye may have noticed a few things here. Firstly, I haven’t pushed my CD-ROM drives back into the case at this point. It turned out I had to move the bottom CD-ROM up to the top slot, because it made contact with the FDD connector. If I disconnected the FDD connector, it went very close to making contact with the DIMMS. This is a bad flaw.

Also, you will notice, if you own one of these boards, that I have connected the firewire to the USB headers and the USB to the firewire. OOPS. No Damage was caused by this, but be careful. The Blue Connector is for USB and the Red Connectors are for Firewire.

Temperatures & Voltages

Ok, without any tweaking, this is the default MBM5 readouts after running the PC for days. These are effectively IDLE temps and voltages, with a Panaflo L1A fan on the CPU at 7v.
The ambient room temperature is 18c

That is an awesome result in comparison to the Asus A7v266. From here, I went to the BIOS and dropped the CPU Core voltage to 1.5v. I ran Prime95 for an hour to make sure all was stable, and MBM only reached 36C under load. Prime95 doesn’t seem to hit the CPU as hard as an SVCD encode of a VOB file, so I tried that. The Temp maxed out at 34°C. At 1.5v the Idle temp is 26°C in ambient 18°C. So what does that all mean? This is a great board for people who want to undervolt their CPU core to reduce heat.

Conclusion

Drivers are simple, the nforce control panel is logical, and everything just works. And that is what I look for in a motherboard. For me Abit has dethroned Asus from the mantle of best board
manufacturer. The Abit NF7-S v2.0 can be purchased from Scorpion Technology for $225.