The area around the CPU socket is treated in the traditional Abit format, well clear of an intrusive components. When I say well clear, I mean very clear of components. Gone is the row of capacitors that typically sit along the bottom edge of the ZIF socket, making HSF mounting a dangerous affair. Along the top and bottom edges, you can make out the small strips of protective material to save the PCB from the horrors of the slipping screwdriver. A single fan header is positioned on the left side of the CPU socket for connecting a HSF unit.
Directly under the CPU socket is the nForce2 chipset, actively cooled by a nice looking orb-style cooler. This cooler is held in place by simple spring clips, making future replacement an easy task. A small fan header is positioned to the left of the chipset cooler for fan power.
The ATX power connector has strayed from the more popular Abit location, top edge of the board, and is now positioned on the left edge, below the CPU socket. This arrangment requires the power cable to routed carefully as to avoid interfering with CPU cooling. Just above the ATX power connector is an oddity in the world of AMD motherboards, a small 12V power connector like the ones seen on Pentium 4 boards. Checking the manual reveals this information:
“General designed ATX power supplies do not have ATX12V1 connector…so you don’t need to connect anything to the ATX12V1 connector.”
That settles that. The board operates fine without the optional 12V connector, even with a power hungry Radeon 9700 installed, so owners of older ATX power supplies need not worry.
The NF7-S supports AGP 8X, and we are pleased to report that we had no problems with our Radeon 9700 in this system. Our last AGP 8X board did not like the 9700, and refused to boot, so this was a welcome change. Unlike some of the Abit boards past, the NF7-S has good clearance between the AGP slot and the DIMM slots. This means no removing the video card to install or remove memory, unless you happen to running a Voodoo5 6000. The AGP slot also includes a locking clip, great news for LAN gamers or people that move their box often.
The board features three DIMM slots, and supports a maximum of 3GB of DDR memory. A unique feature of the nForce2 chipset is support for dual channel DDR memory, something we will cover more during the benchmarking segment of the review. This technology boasts an amazing 6.4GB of throughput when used with dual DDR400 memory. The floppy header is nestled between the edge of the board and the DIMM slots. Recently, I have been taking the Apple approach, and foregoing a floppy drive in my systems. I haven’t missed it.
Moving down the board, we come across the SouthBridge, or MCP-T. The SATA 150 controller is hidden under the NF7-S sticker, sitting just to the left of the two onboard Serial ATA connectors. A standard array of five PCI slots dominates the lower half of the board, notice no CNR slot. Cool. This motherboard supports up to six USB 2.0 ports, and the associated headers are grouped near the Serial ATA connectors, alongside the standard IDE connectors and LED connections.
The rear panel of the NF7-S strays from the standard layout, and the box includes a custom I/O plate for the board. The typical PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard, parallel port, two serial ports are in the usual place, with the lower end of the panel sporting a SPDIF 5.1 out, two USB 2.0 ports, RJ-45 network interface, and direct 5.1 connectors for speakers.
