is the Abit AN7 the board of choice?

[Sylvanas]

is the abit AN7 the board of choice when it come to nforce 2 ultra 400. im planning on buying an nforce 2 ultra 400 based chipset as an upgrade from my kt400. any ideas or better mobos?

 

[Sylvanas]

bah! seems the AN7 wont support a barton 2800+. are there any ultra 400 based mobos that WILL support barton 2800+ (ive had bad luck in the past with mobos not supporting certain cpu's)

 

[Megatomic]

Where did you hear that? The Abit NF2-400 Ultra boards support all known socket462 chips...

 

[Mem]

The DFI NF2 Infinity Ultra is excellent value for money,overclocking board,full of features like SoundStorm,SATA RAID etc...I`m using one at the moment and never had a hiccup .

 

[will889]

The AN7 fully supports all the way to the XP3200. In fact it's the most advanced of all nforce2 motherboards. However I found it to have too many gimmicks. I woudn;t recommend the Infinity to anyone but ovrclockers only that understand that they may have to RMA 2 or 3 times for a working board. Apparently mem got a good one. Problems start with overclocking (core funtions stop working) and unsupported beta bioses are used to correct it (voids warranty). Surely you knew that the AN7 suppported the XP2800? Well, set your mem to 3:3 in your bios, this will give you 200/200 (DDR400/400). Go to expert and back off on your timings some. You must have done something wrong in setup (if you already have the AN7 and have tried it with your XP2800). Apparently you got your KT400 to 2318 Mhz with a pin/socket mod for voltage and multiplers) because the KT400 by itself will never do 2318 Mhz by 'itself' without AGP/PCI getting out of spec in a hurry - even if you use your /5 divider. But if you actually did get your KT400 to that level (?) stable, I don't see why you would want an nforce2 anyway. From your specs looks like you already got the Mhz that is the sole reason most people bought the nforce2.

 

[Sylvanas]

i had a look here and as you can see there is no barton 2800 listed, am i missing something? i also saw this Aopen ak79d-400VN here that looked quite good! do you reccommend this? and i was playing ut2k4 last night for an hour or two and it crashed so i now have my 2800@ 2282. feedback?

 

[SNoWyV82]

Wait, which is better (or preferred): the AN7 or the NF7-S? I'm looking at getting a board for a Barton 2500+

 

[will889]

Abit should have put the XP2800 on thier site as fully compatible. It is. Also the Abit NF7-S is fully compatible. I have set up 2 AN7's, and 5 NF7_S in the shop. I had time to play with one of each. The AN7 has everything you can think of in the bios, actually more than anyone would ever need. Dare I say too much? Yes, I think so. Also the Guru feature is a nice idea but is not fully polished yet (may never be). Overclocking ont he fly in the windows environment is a nice idea but several things can happen. For starters, it lends itself to (noobs) using it often without fully understanding overclocking principals more fully (read voltages) - so locks, reboots, and shutdowns are inevitable. The thing about overclocking that any tru pro will tell you is that you want absolute hard bios control over voltages and clock speeds. Also you don't want stock values to be "reset" upon reboot right after you dial in the perfect overclock. You want it to stay as is. So for that very reason the Abit NF7_S remains the nforce2 king. It is still the most stable and fastest/best overclocker aside from the DFI Infinity (which unless you are prepared for a possible headache with beta bioses to get it stable you may have to deal with). Both boards, the Abit NF7-S and AN7 are great. But for ease of overclocking and a straitforward bios. Take the NF7_S. The thing that the AN7 Has is the Guru overclocking feature (that no-one needs), and Gigabit ethernet, and ALC658 instead of ALC650 for the onboard sound DAC. Better get the best nforce2 while they are still being sold. The new breed of nforce2 will have nothing more than Giga ethernet (which the AN7 already has, and onboard onchip firewall (which will be more of a gimmick because most power users that run HS internet use a NAT firewall anyway (if they care about thier privacy). NF7-S remains the K7 king.

 

[Mem]

I woudn;t recommend the Infinity to anyone but overclockers only that understand that they may have to RMA 2 or 3 times for a working board.

Hoot,sorry mate got to disagree with you here,not even PC Chips has a RMA that high,your figures are way too high,btw any board can arrive/go faulty even Asus,I know somebody that got 3 bad Asus boards in a row,however it`s very unusual for any brand and I would still recommend Asus or any other well known brand.

Bottom line is ALL OVERCLOCKING is done at owners risk,this is a fact regardless of board or brand.DFI Infinity was designed for overclocking but it`s still at owners risk.

One last thing no board is 100% perfect for everyone that includes Abit,in the end its buyers choice.

 

[will889]

Mem. I never gave out any figures per say. I said a user "might" have to to 3 RMA's of the DFI. Case in point? Amdmb. The problems are not seemingly with the board at no- or middle clocks (overclocking) but with attempted 240+/250+ ranges, It literally kills some of the boards, and the core funtions on it (varying) - and requires for now (beta bioses) to fix (how well?) the issues. When I was building in bulk I ordered by the 5 paks (different brands) and the counts measured to +200 over a 34 month period (not counting servers). So I do understand how boards can arrive bad/dead. It does happen. Let's "rephrase" you might have to RMA 3 times to get a good board to..you would probably have a higher chance of an RMA period with the Infinity (probably). That sounds better ABit NF7_S all the way, unless you really know the risks of overclocking, and are willing to work with a potentially very buggy board (DFI infinity).

 

[will889]

Originally posted by: Mem

One last thing no board is 100% perfect for everyone that includes Abit,in the end its buyers choice.

Agreed

 

[Mem]

Agreed

We agreed on something .I `ll say this ,having quality parts(PSU,RAM etc) is important ,especially for overclocking & Sylvanas hardware looks fine in that department.

 

[will889]

That is a superb PSU just for that nice rails. XP2800 is probably older and unlocked. LL Corsair is good. One note about eh A-Open is that it seems newegg customers like it. I have heard a tad different about thier boards, but I do hear they use better capacitors (it's advertised on thier site). I agree with you mem about it really boils down to what the user wants. I know sometimes I like to get something a tad different than what the mass crowd goes for. A-open would certainly fit that catagory.

 

[Sylvanas]

thanks alot guyz, ill go check whats available