Review: Abit AN7

Summary

A good motherboard, whose execution is marred by a lack of significant support in current overclocking tools, a poorly implemented utility set, and a lack of interest from ABIT to address these issues.

Many of you have no doubt been following my trials and tribulations in building my own direct-die waterblock for cooling my CPU. (If not, you can read about it in the forums.) During the course of my experiments I managed to kill my NF7-S motherboard. Having had good luck with my NF7-S, and after having read positive reviews of the AN7 at some other enthusiast sites, I thought getting an AN7 might be a good proposition. The built in μGuru circuit seemed like a real plus (more on that later), and the board was only $1 more from NewEgg than the NF7-S, so I took the plunge.

The Board

The AN7 is very much like the NF7-S. It uses the same general layout, and is based on the same nForce2 chipset as the NF7-S, with the same Serial ATA controller. It has the same number of ports, with one exception, but the ports are arranged slightly differently. You will also note that the ATX power and ATX-12V headers have changed their orientation. This makes it a bit easier to plug and unplug power than with the NF7-S.

The NF7-S has 2 USB, 2 Serial, 1 parallel, S/PDIF out, Ethernet, 5 audio jacks and the keyboard and mouse ports on the back panel, and then four more USB and two Firewire ports on board headers.

On the AN7, you only have one serial port, and no IRDA header (I believe the second serial port is used to communicate with μGuru, but I’m not certain; this also explains the absence of the IRDA header, as this function is usually implemented on the second serial port), but you get 4 USB, 1 firewire, and S/PDIF in, in addition to the ports available on the back panel of the NF7-S. You have a second firewire as well as two more USB ports on board headers.

The IDE headers have rotated 90 degrees and are now arranged down the edge of the board on 90-degree connectors. This means that your ribbon cable now comes off the board to the side, instead of the more tradition vertical orientation. In my Yeong Yang server case this works quite well, but this is a matter of taste. Also, notice the screw hole on the left side of the IDE headers. Most motherboards use this hole for a mounting screw to attach the motherboard to the case. Unfortunately, with the AN7, the hole is too close to the IDE1 connector, and you can't get the screw in.

The board has a plethora of fan headers, with no less than five. While this is only one more than the NF7-S, these are more flexible. Both the CPU and North Bridge fans can be speed controlled now. In addition, one of the auxiliary fan headers (fan 4) can also be controlled. This functionality is enabled through the μGuru.

There are three temp sensors, one for the motherboard itself (the location of which I have not been able to find), one for the CPU (which now uses the built-in thermal diode instead of a socket thermistor), and one for the Vcore regulator section (located near the keyboard/mouse connector). This last sensor is really nice, IMHO, because the Vcore regulator can get quite hot, especially when pushing your board for maximum OC.

AN7 Chipset Regulator	NF7-S Chipset Regulator
AN7 VDIMM Regulator	NF7-S VDIMM Regulator

Probably my most favorite feature on this board is the addition of the dual 7-segment POST Code LED display. Similar to what is found on many other boards these days, ABIT have included a diagnostic display that gives a step-by-step indication of the boot process.

Finally, we come to the μGuru circuit itself. This is not so much a circuit as a dedicated microcontroller, based on the Winbond W83L950D and some associated Windows software. The controller is actually an embedded 8051-based microprocessor originally designed for keyboard interfaces in notebooks. All of the control and monitoring functions for the Vcore, Vdimm, and Vagp regulators, and the fans, are done through this chip. This allows the AN7 board to track the CPU temperature using the CPU thermal diode and report it back to applications while still being able to guarantee shutdown of the CPU quickly in the event of a cooling failure. It also allows this monitoring to be done while using a minimum of host CPU cycles.

The BIOS is very similar to what we have become used to with the NF7-S, so I won’t dwell on it. A couple of new things that have been added are ‘OC on the fly’, and the ability to save up to 5 custom BIOS configurations which can be loaded. The ‘OC on the fly’ option is designed to allow you to apply your BIOS OC changes (such as Vcore and FSB) immediately instead of having to reboot. The custom configuration settings allow you to save your favorite OC settings (such as max absolute OC settings and then max stable OC settings, or similar) so that, when you have to blow your BIOS settings away, you can restore them from FLASH with one keystroke.

The AN7 comes with the normal complement of drivers and utility software. The driver installation is pretty straight forward. The utility installation is a little less so. The utilities will want to install the Winbond Hardware Doctor. Don't! This utility cannot coexist with the Abit AN7 software.

Once the utilities are installed, you will be greeted with a start menu containing the AbitEq, the FanEq, the OCGuru, the Flash Menu, and the Black Box.

The AbitEq is the utility that you use for monitoring system and CPU temps, Fans speeds, and system voltages. It has an interesting design, using a 'skin', which makes it look 'cool'. The display is fairly static, from the standpoint that you get three rows of three guages each, plus a top row of guages that cycles through a set of guages. The functions that are monitored in each of the three lower rows, and in each guage in the top row, are static. For example, the first row of auxiliary guages can only be used to monitor voltages, although you can choose what voltages to monitor. Likewise, the second row is for fan speeds, and the third row is for temps. For the top row of guages, the left guage cycles through various voltages, the middle guage cycles through fan speeds, and the right guage cycles through temps.

FanEq is a utility that allows you to program the voltage range through which the fans operate, and at what temp the range takes effect. You will notice in this picture that I have my CPU Fan set for a low of 8 volts and a high of 12 volts. I also have it set to run at 8 volts all the way up to 50C, and then to ramp up the voltage until I am running maximum voltage at 60C. 8 Volts and 12 volts represent the absolute limits of the adjustable voltage range, however you can set the high and low voltages to anything within those limits. The software allows you to configure the fan voltage and temps to behave in any fashion you desire, or you can select one of the default settings of 'Cool', 'Quiet', and 'Normal'. The NB Fan tab works the same way. I assume that if I had a fan plugged into the System Fan header on the board, there would be another tag for adjusting that.

OCGuru provides you with an interface for adjusting your system speeds. The 'Turbo Mode' shown above only allows you to set the FSB, or to save and load presets. Other than that, it displays some information about the CPU you are running.

The 'F1 Mode' tab provides you with a bit more..........

Here, you have the ability to set the CPU, AGP, and DIMM voltages, in addition to the FSB.

In either mode, I wouldn't recommend actually trying to change these settings. Every time I tried to adjust the FSB, the thing just locked up.

Flash Menu and Black Box

The remaining utilities, Flash Menu and Black Box, are pretty straight forward. Flash Menu is nothing more than a Windows based BIOS flash utility that can download BIOS updates automatically, thus preventing you from accidentally downloading and flashing the wrong BIOS on your mobo, and making the process relatively simple. Black Box simply allows you to store information about your system configuration, so that if you have a problem, Abit tech support can have a simple and easy way to find out how your system is configured.

This board is very similar to the NF7-S in design, so it is not unreasonable to expect it to perform like the NF7-S. Indeed, it does. Just one example of the similarity, SiSoft's Sandra. The tests were conducted using SiSoft's Sandra2004 software and OCZ Platinum EL3200 memory with Trp 3, Trcd 3, Tcas 3.0, Tras 11 timings at 200 Mhz FSB. The CPU was the AthlonXP 2400+ Mobile clocked at 200x11 (2.2 Ghz):

As you can see, the performance of the AN7 and the NF7-S are similar to within the margin of error of Sandra.

Note: In cleaning up this article for presentation, I tried to get some better screen captures. Unfortunately, I had done the original screen captures under Windows 2000. When I went to redo the screen shots for the AN7, I had installed Windows XP. This is the reason for the slight difference in the dialog boxes shown above. Nonetheless, the results I obtained under Windows XP were consistent with the original results taken under Windows 2000.

I was able to overclock the FSB to 241 Mhz on the AN7 vs. 221 Mhz on my NF7-S running at 2.9v VDIMM and 1.6v Chipset, but I don't know if I just happened to get a good board or not. In either case, I am pretty certain my memory is holding back my FSB. Both boards act like they want to go further. Interestingly, neither board showed any gain in stability by increasing the Chipset voltage. If anything, they became more unstable.

Basically, this is a solid board and would be a worthy successor to the NF7-S. In fact, other reviews have shown the AN7 to be so similar in performance to the NF7-S that I almost chose not to benchmark the board at all. In the end I chose to concentrate not so much on the performance, as the other things that are valuable to overclockers; things like support in widely used utilities such as Motherboard Monitor.

As many of you know, MBM 5 is a staple tool among overclockers. It has a simple, no-frills interface that gives you the information you need. In addition, 8rdavcore is a handy utility for tweaking many settings on the nForce2 boards from within Windows. Even Nvidia’s own NVSU and the Winbond hardware monitor have a place in the overclocker’s tool kit. It is exceedingly disappointing, then, that Abit have made the decision to not only change the architecture of the AN7 so that it doesn’t work with these tools, but to not even release the information necessary for the authors of these tools to make them work. (It is true that the author of MBM has been able to finally figure out how to talk to µGuru, but this was without the aid of Abit.) Instead, Abit have written their own set of utilities.

The Abit software is, I feel, a pathetic attempt at an overclocking tool written by people who don’t understand what overclockers want. The software is, in my experience, unstable. It lacks significant flexibility in configuration, and the overclocking options are a joke. The OCGuru software only allows you to twiddle the FSB and voltage settings. There is no provision for changing the CPU multiplier or DRAM timings; these can only be changed in the BIOS. This is probably just as well, because when trying to adjust the FSB, even from 200 to 201 Mhz, the system would almost always simply lock up, and I would be forced to reboot and make the setting change in the BIOS anyway. Attempting to use the ‘OC on the fly’ option in the BIOS often resulted in the same behavior, so I suspect the problem is actually in the μGuru controller. In addition, because I use water cooling, I had the BIOS configured to ignore the fan information. Despite this, I would still periodically get the fan failure alarm, which is why I wrote this review with my CPU HSF installed.

When I got my AN7, the first thing I did was try to get a BIOS update. I was informed that I had to download the latest Flash Menu utility before I could flash the new bios. When I downloaded the new utility and installed it, a NEW Start Menu entry was created for Flash Menu, despite the fact that I already had an existing entry as part of the µGuru software installation. Worse, when I click on the old Flash Menu utility, that simply crashes, and I can't uninstall it without also uninstalling the other µGuru utilities.

The Black Box utility is a nice idea, but it requires the user to MANUALLY enter a lot of information that it should be able to detect on its own; things like the type of CPU installed, the type of motherboard and the BIOS version, the operating system installed, etc., etc.

Basically, the only piece of software in this package that seemed to work without a hitch was the FanEq. This has a relatively simple interface and seems to do what it is designed to do. However, the same thing can be accomplished in the BIOS (which you are going to be spending a lot of time in, anyway, if you try to overclock this board).

One problem I encountered while working with this system is that I was not able to get my FSB over about 210 or 211 Mhz without experiencing problems with my Ethernet interface. Troubleshooting with some people on the Abit support forums lead us to the conclusion that the south bridge was getting too hot. Unfortunately, I killed the board before I was able to test this theory; however, the south bridge chip DOES run rather hot (as high as 65C surface temp), so Abit might want to consider putting a heat sink on this chip in the future. As well, anyone running any nForce2 based board, particularly with the MCP-T south bridge, should consider some cooling for the chip.

Oh, and about me killing the board: As a simple experiement, I tried setting Trp from 2 to 1. I really didn't expect this to work, so I wasn't surprised when the board failed to reboot. Imagine my surprise, however, when I discovered that the board had blown its flash. I ended up having to hot-flash the BIOS chip by booting my NF7-S, installing my AN7 ROM and then using AWDFLASH with the -f option to force it to flash the AN7 BIOS while in the NF7-S. Once that was done, I was then able to reboot on my AN7. An examination of the BIOS while it was in the NF7-S revealed that it had been COMPLETELY wiped. After I got the AN7 back up, I was able to put a HSF on the south bridge, and the board was stable up to 241 Mhz clock on the FSB. I haven't tried this experiment on my NF7-S or any other board, so I don't know if they all suffer from the same problem or not. In any case, the BIOS shouldn't allow you to make a setting that will literally destroy your board. That is just poor software design.

While this is in general a nice board, Abit’s implementation of μGuru has resulted in a board that has some issues overclocking, and doesn’t work at all with many of our favorite overclocking tools (although Alex Van Kamm has managed to get it more or less working with MBM, in spite of Abit's best efforts to the contrary). This wouldn’t be so bad, except that the tools that Abit provides are crap, and Abit have no desire to publish the information necessary for other people to write utilities that work and have publicly stated as much (see this thread on Abit's forums ). Not all of the BIOS options work properly (‘OC on the fly’ and disabling the CPU Fan alarm). As a result, I cannot honestly recommend this board to an enthusiast, which is where this board is squarely aimed. If you are not an enthusiast, there are other boards on the market that perform as well with similar feature sets, don’t have the headaches, and cost less.

Note: This article was originaly written in March 2004, and the board I received had version 10 of the BIOS. It is now late August 2004. I have upgraded both the BIOS and the drivers to the latest version as of this writing (BIOS version 15, nVidia Unified Driver version 4.27). The problems I mention elsewhere in this article still exist.

I would like to thank Allan and Áedán for their input on this review. They helped me take this article from rough draft to something that was worthy of being published.