Question have an NF7-S v2 on way in mail

I have a question about the sound issues I am reading about that owners are experiencing. Is it true that above the 200 fsb zone the sound can crackle and pop and the cure for this is to add active or passive cooling to the SB??

Second is the sound better than the card I am currently using which is Hercules Fortissimmo II digital w EAX?? Of the 2 which would use less cpu cycles as I can sell the card and put the cash towards the board to make it cheaper.

Cisco KID

I have experienced crackling in sound even at low fsb and adding cooling to the southbridge did not 100% cure it. From all the things I have read it seems to be a combination of both heat and driver version.

I put the north bridge fan on the south bridge. Mostly eliminated all of my problems. The nVidia soundstorm is on par with an Audigy card. Go for it.

I went thru the sound issues as well. I got so fed up with it, that I put my old SB Live Value! in there for a bit. I did partly because I needed a game port for my ancient steering wheel too, but I digress...

I had put an old i486 HSF on the southbridge right off the bat, and plugged it into where the Abit northbridge plugs in (as I'm watercooling the NB), so I can also say that simply putting a heatsink on the southie will not always cure the sound issues.

When I got my new HDD (Maxtor 160GB), I just put the SB drivers in... I then (with all the room I now had, going from a 20GB to 160GB drive) started installing a ton of old games I hadn't loaded up in forever. I got (re)hooked on MS Golf '01, and haven't put the steering wheel drivers back in.

Sooooo...anyways, to make a short story long, at one point thereafter, I decided to pull the SB card, and try the Soundstorm again. I uninstalled the SB stuff, and installed the drivers from the Abit CD... I can't explain why, but I haven't had a single problem since. Not that I'm upset by this turn of events...LOL.

I don't dare update the drivers...now that it's working right I don't want to screw with it.

Put a sink on the southie, and try the Abit drivers. If it acts up, try uninstalling them and reinstalling again....

good luck!

B.

i put my comp up to 200fsb got distortion, so i ordered a cheap vantec icqberq chipset cooler thing. was gonna use the fan (exact same as the nb cooler) but i couldnt come up with a way get it to fit well. So i just used one of the dinky little heatsinks and some thermal tape and was amazed at how such a small little heatsink and some cheap thermal tape could make such an improvment.

slap a small heatsink on the sb and 90% chance your problems will go away

if that doesn't work, change acpi uniprocesor pc to advance power .....

thanks for the replies guyts, will be installing the board tommorrow

Cisco KID