The story of AMD’s rise to fame starts several years ago.  Some of you may not even remember the early days of the K7, way back when CPUs were still in slots, and a video card called Voodoo was still around.  Yes, kids, those were exciting times.  AMD was challenging the great Intel, and early reports said that this new K7 was quite the ass kicker.  The only weakness in the AMD plan was the motherboard support.  People speculated that with Intel’s market power, no serious manufacturer would dare build a chipset to support this new CPU, thus killing AMD’s hopes of conquering the giant.

Of course, PC history students will recall that VIA stepped up and released a solid AMD chipset, and the rest is, well, history.  Over the years, it was VIA or nothing when it came to AMD performance, until NVIDIA stepped into the fray.  The release of the nForce chipset was the first major threat to VIA’s dominance of the AMD market.  The nForce was followed by the nForce2, the next generation of NVIDIA chipsets, and offers a very solid feature set with good speed and stability. 

With the Abit’s reputation for extremely overclocker-friendly boards, the NF7-S was greeted with great expectations in our office.  The box seems a little heavier than most of the other motherboards we have, so that’s a good thing, right?  Sure.

In the Box

Sporting the typical red and black box design, the nForce2 arrives packed with every conceivable part, cable, and manual.  Inside, you will find a well written manual, delivered in about 400 different languages.  Standard IDE cables, driver CD, and floppy disk for the Serial ATA are included, as to be expected.  For users that have no idea about the Serial ATA, a quick setup sheet has been tossed in the box, complete with pictures for the reading impaired.  The included Serial to ATA converter allows standard drives to be connected to the mainboard, rather than using the IDE connectors.  Both IEEE 1394 (FireWire), and USB 2.0 port brackets round out the hardware package.

The board itself is something of a departure from the other Abit boards we have tested in the past.  The layout has several changes, some good, some not.  We’ll start with a tour of the various items of interest scattered around the PCB, beginning with the CPU socket, and moving our way down from there.  Seems like a good place to start, anyway.