New motherboard

[Howard]

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.

[blockers]

Dont know how much of an improvement itll be (unfamiliar with the ECS board...)

Just screw it in, connect to power. Proper nice board, install the chipset drivers and everything should be lovely

Will

[Howard]

How good is the onboard sound?
How many USB2 headers does it have? What cables/brackets/etc come with it?

[Austin]

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).

[Howard]

Thanks for all that.

One thing; Does it have a parallel port, for my printer?

[Austin]

Yep, although you may want to consider a printer upgrade (esp to USB) depending upon your reqs (and budget).

[Howard]

Can't afford a printer tbh, and I don't really need one.

I might buy a Canon of somesort in the future though.

Well I guess I'll be buying this mobo once funds allow!

I'll need some thermal paste though, is the £2.something one on Komplett good enough? It should be. I'm not paying £7 for a different tube on there, nor am I going all the way to PC World just for that

Also, there is an NF7 and an NF7-M. What is the difference btween those and the NF7-S, etc?

And is the NForce2 sound better than that of an SB Live?

[Austin]

It is a top mobo, both the ABit NF7-S and Asus' A7N8X Deluxe are. The -S & Deluxe above denote the top end of these mobos and contain many little extras but most notably use the wonderful full nVidia implimentation of Soundstorm. The other ones don't. The NF7-M gives you onboard gfx but they are pretty dire (GF4MX) and I hear 400FSB can be a hassle with them too. Basically there are 4 key types of nForce chipset ...

Original = unofficial 400FSB + Dual Channel DDR.
Ultra400 = official 400FSB + Dual Channel DDR.
400 = official 400FSB + Single Channel DDR (ie std).
IGP = unofficial 400FSB + Dual Channel DDR (usually).

The Dual Channel is enabled by using 2 (correctly placed) sticks of RAM and gives you a good 5% boost, a LOT more speed if you use the IGP (but it's still very slow). Other variations are to do with NICs etc but most importantly whether it has MCP (average onboard sound) or MCP-T/Soundstorm (top notch sound). The MCP-T/Soundstorm is easily better than a SB Live, not that the Live was bad but it did seriously hog both the PCI and CPU.

Any paste should be decent enough, it's only to plug the tiny imperfections in the HS anyway. It is best to buy some Artic Silver or Cooler Master though, they're considered 2 of the best and a tube lasts a LONG time.

[Howard]

NF7-S it is then!!

THanks for all your help Austin mate

[SilentDeath]

just to point out my Original = unofficial 400FSB + Dual Channel DDR will happly do ddr440 with no volt mods (max in bios though)

nf7-s is considerably more annoying to set up, i found the k7s5a to be just stick it in, attack cables, it works. whereas mine and my brothers nf7-s had probs like cpu fan turning off (due to the h/w doctor app bundled with it) and a few other things.. its a good mobo though and is just as stable as my k7s5a (aslong as you dont use a pci gfx card - blue screens every time you shutdown!)