My fellow reviewer, Kuzals, recently took a look at the Abit NF7-M (review here), Abit's nForce 2 solution with integrated graphics. Today I am looking at the "enthusiast" version, the NF7-S. Superficially very similar to the NF7-M, the NF7-S lacks the IGP of its brother, instead featuring the SSP chipset and an extra serial port. It also features SATA unlike the M version (which does not). Otherwise the two boards are very similar indeed.
The box is, again, identical to the NF7-M, although it sports a Serillel sticker, informing the customer that the board includes a SATA to IDE adaptor. This allows you to make use of a regular IDE drive on the SATA ports, which is handy if you are already filling the 2 IDE channels, but otherwise just a gimmick. No ATA drive manages to fill the 133MB/s constraint of IDE, let alone the 150MB/s of SATA. Included in the box is:
- The Board
- I/O Backing plate
- Instruction Manual
- Driver and Applications CD
- USB PCI backing plate
- Firewire PCI backing plate
- A single IDE cable (lame Abit, lame)
- Floppy Cable
- A single SATA cable
- SATA driver floppy disk
- A single Serillel adaptor
You can buy the Abit NF7-S in the UK from Chillblast for £79.50ex VAT, which makes it at least a tenner cheaper than the A7N8X from Asus. US readers can pick up an NF7-S for around $115 (check out prices here).
