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Layout and Components Considerations

In recent months there is less and less to complain about in terms of layout of boards. The Abit NF7 is just one of those boards that you can't really do much complaining about in this department. The ATA sockets are placed near the middle of the board, which puts it closer to your actual hard drives. The RAM is far enough away from the AGP slot that most smaller cards will have no problems, though anyone owning a full length card (like the GF4 4600, or even the upcoming NV35 boards, if their reference designs are any hint) may not be able to access their RAM when the card is installed. I think this is a minor problem though since all the ATI cards are short enough to pose no problems whatsoever. The two power connectors are placed together, and far enough from the CPU area that the power cables could be routed safely

away from the HSF. You'll find no general orientation or spaciousness problems with the CPU socket though users of some peltier or large devices requiring special anchoring will find that the earlier revisions of this board may be missing the 4 extra holes around the socket for such devices. Our revision had them - so no worries there.

For those who care, the chipset fan is relatively quiet - we still would have preferred a nice, large, fanless heatsink just to keep things quieter, and so that there's one less thing to worry about breaking down.

BIOS and Overclocking Features

Revision 1.2 of this board extends the range of the CPU vcore and the memory Vcore. The CPU Vcore now hits up to 2.3V, compared to the previous limit of 1.85V, which many of you will agree is nearly useless for the serious (or mad) overclocker.

Given that the 1.2 revision has the increased CPU core range, the board is more suited for overclocking than before. We've yet to be able to reach anywhere near the outrageous 250MHz limit but I'm sure many of you will be able to hit the 190-205Mhz range. We're fairly confident that users should be able to hit above 180MHz.