Abit AN7 (nVidia nForce II 400 Ultra) Review
Performance
I took Albatron KX18D Pro II (nVidia nForce II 400 Ultra) and Epox 8KRA2+ (VIA KT600) as contenders to the board in question.
In our test configuration, we used the following hardware:
| Test configuration |
| Processor |
Athlon XP (Barton core) 2 GHz = 10х200 |
| Video card |
Ati Radeon 9500 128Mb (8x1 ; 400/300)
Ati Catalyst v3.8 |
| Sound card |
Creative Live 5.1 |
| HDD |
IBM DTLA 307030 30Gb |
| Memory |
2x 256 MB PC3200 TwinX DDR SDRAM made by Corsair |
| Case |
Inwin506 with PowerMan 300W power supply unit |
| OS |
Windows XP SP1 |
On both the boards, the following memory latency timings were set:
- FSB = 200 MHz (DDR400)
- CAS Latency = 2T
- Trp = 3T
- Tras = 6T
- Trcd = 3T
Let's first take a look at the results of synthetic benchmarks.
Now on to the gaming benchmarks.
Final Words
The most essential conclusion: Abit AN7 is at least no worse than the Abit NF-S rev 2.0 motherboard. To be more specific, it is more attractive in terms of functionality: it offers better quality of integrated audio (in my humble opinion), wide potentials for adjusting the rotation of fans, support for BIOS setting profiles. But this was achieved due to a trade-off: the price of AN7 is somewhere in between 115-120$, while that for NF7-S is about ~110$ (including the Serillel adapter). The difference is not that great, but keep in mind that Abit motherboards are relatively more expensive as compared to other boards offering the MCP-T (for comparison - Epox 8RDA+ rev 2.x costs 83-85$). Actually, Abit produce has never been cheap...
As regards the mGuru chip and accompanying utilities, the real benefit comes only from the FanEQ and BIOS setting profiles.
Resume: those who already have NF7-S do not need to replace it with AN7. But the buyer of a new computer can absolutely safely choose between AN7 and NF7-S: the difference between them is only in the mGuru chip.
Conclusion
Pros:
- High stability and good performance;
- Support for SerialATA (2 channels; RAID);
- Integrated 6.1 audio (MCP-T) and LAN;
- Support for USB2.0 (6 ports) and IEEE-1394 (Firewire, 2 ports);
- A wide selection of ABIT's own technologies (FanEQ; POST-controller, BIOS setting profiles, FlashMenu, BlackBox);
- Powerful overclocking tools + plus excellent results;
- Active cooling of the chipset; assembly holes available.
Cons:
- Price a bit too high;
- Poor package bundle;
- Flaws in the software part.
The board's specific features:
- The system monitoring is available only through the Abit EQ utility.
Read more on this topicA Roundup of nVidia nForce II 400 Ultra Motherboards
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