I just found the secret to higher FSB speeds on the NF7-S~

I can't say if this will help anyone else, but before doing this my highest stable FSB was 210MHz. I thought I was being held back by my XMS PC3000 which is rated for only 185MHz, but tonight I found that to be wrong.

I decided to try getting my FSB higher, and I disabled CPUInterface in softmenuIII.. The results are AMAZING!!! I'm still climbing FSB wise, but here's my progress so far:





My timings are 11-2-2-2. 11 you ask? I found that I get better performance with it set to 11, after testing 5, 7, and 11. Don't ask me why, though... VDimm is 2.8v.

Give it a shot, guys. I want to see if this will help anyone else.

Update:

Forgot to mention I'm running SC, not DC. VDD is 1.7v. VDimm is now 2.9v.



I'm really loving this! Work in 3 hours though, so I'm going to let it Prime all night.

Congrats Fever!
Thanks for the tip ! Haven't had time to crack open the manual or really tweak any settings. I made another trip back to the Computer Expo and got another NF7-S 2.0 for my other system. The guy let me have this one for $75 !!!!!! That ones going in my other system with the 1700 "B" I use for encoding video and downloading mp3's. I'll probably put my epox 9a2 & 5a2 in the classifieds next week.

Have you tried the L12 mod yet ? Been reading good things about it ! I'm doing it after I install the chipset coolers I picked up today .

eh, i'm not ready for bed yet so i'll give it a try. my max now is 230Mhz so i don't know if i'll get the same results as you but i'll be happy if i can hit 240Mhz

::edit:: well, i can get up to 238Mhz now but it's really not stable. my max stable is still 230Mhz, on the other hand i couldn't even post at 232Mhz before so i guess it let me get up to 238Mhz and post.... it's just not stable in windows. i know it isn't my ram holding me back as i tried using a 6/5 divider so my ram stayed at 200Mhz when i tried 240Mhz fsb and when i used 238Mhz i used the same divider so my ram was actually underclocked.

it didn't work for me but as i said before, i was already hitting 230Mhz. good luck to whoever tried this next, i hope you get better results then i did.

thanks fever for posting your results
::edit::

CPU Interface severely limited my FSB as well. However, if you try benchmarking your system at the same FSB but with CPU int. disabled, you should notice a significant drop in performance (both CPU and memory, if I remember correctly), at least according to SiSoft Sandra. I'm not sure whether I've got better performance now with my higher FSB and CPU int. disabled... But higher FSB gives me bigger bragging rights, so I'll stick to trying to increase my FSB.. ^^

I think enabling cpu interface speeds up the timing in your northbridge. So its like relaxing the timings in your memory to get a higher clock. So you need to test with both... and see which is faster... higher fsb slower timings... or lower fsb with fast timings.

Well, I'm fully stable at 240FSB, 11-2-2-2. This simple BIOS setting gave me an extra 60MHz of speed for my RAM.

IR1 said:

I think enabling cpu interface speeds up the timing in your northbridge. So its like relaxing the timings in your memory to get a higher clock. So you need to test with both... and see which is faster... higher fsb slower timings... or lower fsb with fast timings.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that's what I think too. One thing is for sure though, I was getting 3.1Gb/s at 210FSB, and now I'm getting 3.5gb/s, so I'll stick to that.

I wonder what DC could do for me...


BTW, I don't think the board is holding me back. I wish I had some better DDR to try out.

Fever said:

BTW, I don't think the board is holding me back. I wish I had some better DDR to try out.

Click to expand...

well, if you want to see where the board tops out you could use a 6:5 mem/fsb divider, you'll see how high your board will go with better ram.

john240sx said:

well, if you want to see where the board tops out you could use a 6:5 mem/fsb divider, you'll see how high your board will go with better ram.

Click to expand...

Oh yeah! Didn't think of that. Thanks for the tip.

Nice job....can't wait to get my NF7-S 2.0 back from Abit Refurb...will be here on Thursday.

Going into the board will be a new 2500+ and my current XMS 3500C2 coupled with a new Enermax 430 and dual Raptors in Raid 0

i'm suprised you guys havnt heard of this, it's fairly old news