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.