In a couple of weeks I will be purchasing an Abit NF7-S 2.0 hopefully, and well I was just wondering if there is anything I should know with regards setting it up, etc, or I just plug it in and everything works?
And how much of an improvement over my current mobo (ECS K7S5A) will there be?
Thanks.


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Well firstly you'll be going from a cheap bargain basement manu (ECS) to a top of the class manu (Abit), you should notice the diff in features, stability, build quality etc.
ECS K7S5A uses the SiS735 chipset right? That's good chipset as fast as the KT266A and from the same era. As such it only supports PC2100 and 266FSB (by default) so you'll be going up to Dual-PC3200 (effectively 6400MB/s) and 400FSB and that's without pushing things. You'll also get a huge amount of tweaking (& o/c'ing) options which is the biggest weak point of SiS chipsets. That includes safety fallback, voltage adjustment, multiplier adjustment, thermal protection, full FSB adjustment and locked PCI/AGP to name but a few. You also get superb onboard surround sound coutesy of nVidia's Soundstorm, way better than any onboard sound and often superior to almost all consumer PCI soundcards. In additon you get 2xATA133 controllers and also 2xSATA controller and a bundled IDE->SATA convertor. Also AGP8x (not needed but nice), 6xUSB2 (IIRC), Firewire (2?), top class onboard NIC and 3 DIMM slots. I think you'll notice the diff LOL!
Installing is a breeze as blockers says, just ensure you apply SP1 to WinXP before installing mobo drivers otherwise you can have probs with USB2 (IIRC). So you don't need to set anything (no dips/jumpers) just make sure the HSF is attached and plugged in (but even then you have a safety override).

