what to get...looking at NF7-S v2

ITPaladin

Golden Member
Dec 16, 2003
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I haven't kept up to date with the computer hardware scene since I built my first system with a KT7A and Tbird 1 Ghz.

Since it seems my board died, I have been looking around on websites including Newegg customer reviews.

I notice people seem to like the board. I also notice that the Athlon 2500+ Barton sounds like a good deal to OC with the board.

I don't want to spend more than $100 on the board. I don't know what my current CPU would OC too.
I was never into doing that much. The board couldn't take it up that far anyway.

Since I only have $400 / month to work with after rent/food...does this look like a worthy replacement?

Is it actually an upgrade of significance?

I have a 512 MB PC 133 RAM stick in there at present too.
 

magratton

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Mar 16, 2004
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The NFS-7 V2.0 board (not the NF7-S2) is a great motherboard. I have used several of them and all have worked flawlessly. I would highly recommend that board.

Also, I see you were stating the Athlon 2500+ Barton, make sure you get the Mobile version of this, as it will be much better at the OC for you.

One point of contention here, your PC133 RAM will not work with this motherboard so you will have to upgrade that as well. Make sure you buy PC3200 RAM as the above combination will easily run at 200FSBx11 @ 1.65-1.7v even with a mediocre power supply. With a decent Power supply, you can expect to run 200x11.5 or 200x12 without problems.

BTW: if you are not shy about buying online check out the For Sale/Trade forum here and search for these items. Chances are you can pick them up for less than what you will buy brand new and in many cases in almost new condition.

Good luck on your purchases!
 

mechBgon

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Oct 31, 1999
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Touching on the power supply issue, the NF7-S and many other modern boards need a PSU with an ATX12V cable, so if you don't have that, it's a great excuse to get a good-quality new power supply while you're at it. Antec's SL350 is a good all-around one. If you envision getting a monster video card sometime, it couldn't hurt to go higher, but make sure you get a quality unit and not some cheap flashy piece of junk with a 500W rating or whatnot. :p
 

ITPaladin

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Dec 16, 2003
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I don't know what kind of cable is on the current power supply.

I will have to stick with my old Tbird til I can feel comfortable buying an upgrade CPU.

It's hard affording things when working 32 hrs /week near min wage + going to school.

Regarding the mobile, are you talking about this?

Perhaps this is a different one? I thought it should be 333 fsb?

The non-mobile with 333 fsb is cheaper. I assume the OEM means it will not come with fan, heatsink, and paste.

Mag you say:

The NFS-7 V2.0 board (not the NF7-S2) is a great motherboard. I have used several of them and all have worked flawlessly. I would highly recommend that board.

I assume you mean this board is the good one since there is no such thing as NFS-7.

On memory, I see the lowest prices at Newegg, including the refurb section, is on cas 3 with 512mb. How much of a difference is that from 2.5?

Some of the companies I have never heard of, such as Rosewill. I can get refurb Rosewill CAS 3-4-4 (which those numbers I don't understand) cheaper than buying one 1GB stick.

I do sometimes play FPS, and will be receiving HL2 free from coupon, but mostly EQ and possibly EQ2 will take up my time.
 

magratton

Senior member
Mar 16, 2004
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Many questions and comments here:
1) Yes, I meant NF7-S not NFS-7. Good call.
2) The mobile CPU is setup and rated at lower FSB for power consumption reason. But you can just change that in the NF7-S bios to be 200FSB (400Mhz) and it will work just fine. In fact the Desktop version will overclock, but the mobile is though to be actually cut from the core as a AMD 3200 processor, and then downgraded and sold as a 2500, but a 2500 that can run at 1.45volts as opposed to a 3200 that runs at 1.65volts. As well the FSB and multipliers are completely unlocked on the CPU so you can really vary how it is setup in your bios to get the best overclock.
3) Yes you will need to buy a heatsink for any OEM CPU, including the mobiles. Retail means it includes a heatsink. None of the Mobiles are retail.
4) CAS2.5 to CAS3, honestly, it will not make much of a difference. The CAS2.5 has a little more potential headroom to run at higher FSB, but if you are only thinking of running at 200/400FSB then you will not need that. In terms of realworld computer use (internet, gaming, etc) , you will not really notice a difference between these two RAM chips at the same FSB. if you were doing scientific computing or distributed processing then there would be a noticeable difference. It is conceivable that a difference would be seen in video processing (like rendering a DVD movie or something like that) but honestly, i think we are talking in seconds or possibly a minute or two, nothing major!
5) I have never used Rosewill RAM. I prefer the confort of some more namebrand manufacturers (Kingston, Corsair, etc.)
6) GAWD! You mentioned Evercrack to a recovering addict, time to go lay in cold sweats on the floor....
7) Your current Athlon processor will run just fine on this mobo until you are ready to upgrade. But just in case you can be tempted: YHPM!

Michael.
 

ITPaladin

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Dec 16, 2003
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My Newegg order for the board and corsair value ram 512 mb / cas 2.5 went through.

Thanks.

I will get a mobile probably in a month or two.

What sink, fan, paste should I buy?

I see people talk about Arctic Silver.

What do you mean by

But just in case you can be tempted: YHPM!
 

ITPaladin

Golden Member
Dec 16, 2003
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bump and...

bah I was trying to take off my old tbird and the heatsink came off the cpu.

I guess I have an excuse to get some Arctic Silver 5 and try it on my tbird.


 

imported_Kiwi

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Jul 17, 2004
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:(Not all AMD XP's will act exactly the same when it comes to how effective a heat sink is required. If you'd named the HSF that the T-Bird was using, I missed it. I have three XP-family (K-7) AMD cpu's in PC's, and the stock HSF with the 2600 barely keeps it in some state of safety (but quietly). The T-Bird 1.33 has a small HSF from Cooler Master that is fairly noisy, and runs quite nicely with no threatened overheating.

Incidentally, neither the pads some HSF's come with, nor any type of paste, is supposed to keep the HSF stuck to the processor. The clips keep it attached to the socket, is all.

My 2800 is also running cool enough, with an AeroFlow HSF; it's not a happy cpu, however. Not from heat, although I'd sure like to find a 70 mm fan grille. It's in another NF7, and in addition to giving up various overclocking capabilities, this NF7 apparently has a bad memory controller. It's an NF7-S2"G", and the difference in a "plain" -S2 and the -S2G is advertised as Gigabyte speed LAN. The nVidia Southbridge (M-something- three initials) chip and reference MB from April of this year offered IDE RAID, but no one was admitting to have implemented that. As it turned out, that was included after all.

With a pair of Kingston Value RAM DIMMs in the slots 2 &amp; 3, I couldn't run a Win98 install, not from CD, nor from a copy of the CD's \Win98 folder on the Hdd. I finally cloned an entire drive, swapped it to Master in the source PC, and started clearing devices out. From a past experience a month ago, I also ininstalled Norton's NSW 2003 (should've dumped NAV as well, and run the cleanup to get all the detritus. Finally, this style of putting an OS on th enew PC worked.

But totally unstable. The source drive had just been scanned for adware/malware, and for virus infections shortky before being cloned. The new PC can hardly run 15-20 minutes, even in idle, without something happening. At first, I blamed my Kingston Value RAM. The many BSOD's shared about a half dozen address locations, so I pulled the one in Slot 2 (for dual channel, I had them in slots two and three).

The system wouldn't try to post on that DIMM. Not at all. Swapped with the one that had been in slot two, the system was up, and the fatal errors were over. Not the problems. It has severe free memory leaks &amp; drains its resource pools in minutes when any program is running. Solitaire takes 3% all by itself (not even a noticeable change in resources on the reference PC I'm using as my primary now). On bootup, it has 604 Kb of free RAM in the lowest 640, and the resources are already down to 53% free.

Running nothing but Aida32 changed that quickly. Resources dropped to 10% User and System (GDI resources still abouve 90%). Using task manager to close everything other than Explorer, System Monitor, and Systray brought the resources back to 13%. That's terrible. So I went out and bought some retail cost PNY Optima DIMMs, in case it was still a RAM problem. It's not.

:brokenheart: