Recommended bios for NF7-S v 2

I plan to install this new board I just got. I have no idea what bios is on it as I bought used and never asked. I am assuming it is 1.7.

I plan to run raid 0, and am wondering if there is a specific bios I want. I se that 17, 10, and 18 seem quite popular. As far as additional cooling for the board I have replaced the NB fan with a Vantec Iceberg and AS3 since it pushes more air, I will add a passive heatsink to SB and a 60 mm fan will be rigged to blow directly on the SB area. Have given thought to mosfet cooling via some bga ram sinks but do not now if this is necessary. Using an AX7 with Thermaltake Smart Fan2 on a Barton 2500 with 1 gig of PC3500 EL DDR OCZ .


Any feedback please, as well as particular bios settings regarding ram timing. I am wondering the difference between 6/6 and 3/3 as example as my Soltek Nforce2 did not offer these settings

Cisco KID

6/6 and 3/3 are both a 1 to 1 ratio, I believe you'll find no difference between the two.

I'm at work right now (so the rig in my sig isn't what I'm typing this on...), but I believe I'm running BIOS 1.6 My board came w/ 1.0 (but I've had it a while...). I went thru 1.4, which didn't seem to effect anything, in either the positive or negative, to the 1.6, which also hasn't really changed much of anything for the good or bad either.

The various BIOSes did effect the temps as detected (one showed 'em high, one low, can't remember which was which), but that's the only thing I've actually "noticed". I didn't get a miracle 20 FSB or anything from a new BIOS.

I modified one of the heatsinks that came with the TT Chrome orb to fit the mosfets....haven't noticed any improvement "overclocking"-wise from that....but it sure as heck looks nice...big ol' chunk of chrome finned goodness tacked on there....

I put an old i486 HSF on my southbridge... just fit between the IDE sockets and those caps. Where I'm running a Ti4200, it clears that, too, but I might have to pull the fan off, when I go to a newer card (ie 9700/9800 Pro) someday.

As far as other settings regarding ram timing, I can't help ya there, but will be interested to see what other people have to say on it, as I could use some tips myself.

Cheers!

B.

Well version 10 is typically considered a good version for fsb overclocking but it is also an early version and is buggy. There were SATA RAID issues in those early versions I believe. You may want to go with 17 or 18 if you are going to use the onboard raid.

ill have to try out that versoin 10 bios...im using the newest...18 i believe...and cant get above 198fsb....ran prime for 12 hours @ 198...i try 200 and it fails in less than a minute.

-TriX

-=TriX-R4-KidS= said:

ill have to try out that versoin 10 bios...im using the newest...18 i believe...and cant get above 198fsb....ran prime for 12 hours @ 198...i try 200 and it fails in less than a minute.

-TriX

Click to expand...

Have you tried the L12 mod? In my experience that is the single biggest contributor to getting higher fsb if you hit a wall at a low #.

I've used 12 through 18 and same as Mr.B notes, I can't see any measureable difference except temp read outs. Tweaked a number of bios setting with no real performance effect except the memory timings (of course).

The L12 mode produced the biggest effect I saw but only about 5Mhz for me, others quote 20 or more. At some point I'll try the pencil Vcc voltage mod but I see various opinions of its worth on the v2, otherwise I'm about maxed out at 216FSB.

Good luck on your board, hope ya got a top OCer.

doing all those modifications before youve actually used the board doesnt really seem like the way to go for me. most of us are hitting 230 without any additions cooling. Most of us dont need cooling on the SB, and nearly all of us wouldnt see any difference in cooling the mostfets. Having said the though, it would look good lol

anyway as the others have said, i cant say ive seen any difference at all except in the voltage and temp readings between the various bioses.

passive cooling for sb is very necessary...

L12 mod is great, i went from 181 to 220, that's 39mhz!!!! i was shocked myself at how much i got out of the system by just adding a tiny little U shapped wire into the mobo socket

bios 10 is used by the hardcore overclockers i'd say cuase it's buggy and all BUT it doesn't have the but that disables multies 9 through 10.5 if cpu interface is enabled when going for a fsb higher than 230 i beleive...

i've only used bios 18 so far and i have no problems with it... btw bios 10 still has the bios corruptoin issue i believe(since it was teh first bios) and i don't think i'd use bios 10 unless i had a bios savior...

no it is not necessary. it is *only* necessery IF you have problems. i dont have any problems at 227mhz dc and above, and im not cooling the southbridge.....

i estimate that about 9 out of 10 users get sound crackling issues with nf2 boards, this is only taking into account the a7n8x and nf7...

not that many. ive built 5 pc's, all of them using nf7's except one which uses an asus a7n8x deluxe. none of the have cooling on the sb,. and none of them have problems.