Last week, a friend offered me a pair of 10 hour old Raptor's at a price I simply couldn't refuse. As my NF7 does not support SATA, I needed a new mobo. The choices boiled down to either a NF7-S or a DFI Infinity. I already have a DFI NFII Ultra-AL which OC's fairly well. Interestingly, when running the same config as the NF7, with exactly the same components, the DFI consistently benches lower than the same components/config in a NF7. With this in mind, I decided to go with the NF7-S, as I've been extremely happy with the NF7 in my sig.
When the board arrived - metal lever/Rubycon (SP?) caps, in case anyone is interested - I installed it right away. Not being the patient sort, I began testing almost immediately. With the config in my sig, it failed Prime in less than 5 minutes. According to MBM, its Vdimm is ~.05V less than what's supplied by the NF7, showing as 2.96V vs.3.01v. Its Vcore seems to fluctuale a lot less, though, with MBM registeing between 1.79-1.81V @ 1.85V in BIOS. Too, its NB cooler runs silently which pleased me to no end; the one on the NF7 made so much high-pitched noise that I replaced it with a passive Zalman. But, I digress....
Even after I loosened the timings on the RAM, the board would still fail Prime, albeit, taking more time to do so. As the mobo came with BIOS 20 installed, while the NF7 in my sig runs very well with BIOS 18, I flashed the NF7-S with BIOS 18 and things started to look a lot more promising. I still had problems maintaining a stable 220x11 at 2-2-2-11 - I'm guessing due to less voltage being supplied to the sticks - but maintained stability at 2-3-2-11, which is fine with me. To make a long story short, I think I've found a Prime-stable config at 218x11 (2.4GHz) @ 1.85V, and it's been Priming at that speed for the last 14 hours (priority 10), running 43C max.
As I'm about to receive the Raptor's, and seeing how several experienced members of this forum run them in RAID 0 with the NF7-S, I'm wondering if there are any helpful hints you could share. I'm also wondering if there are known SATA issues with BIOS 18.
When the board arrived - metal lever/Rubycon (SP?) caps, in case anyone is interested - I installed it right away. Not being the patient sort, I began testing almost immediately. With the config in my sig, it failed Prime in less than 5 minutes. According to MBM, its Vdimm is ~.05V less than what's supplied by the NF7, showing as 2.96V vs.3.01v. Its Vcore seems to fluctuale a lot less, though, with MBM registeing between 1.79-1.81V @ 1.85V in BIOS. Too, its NB cooler runs silently which pleased me to no end; the one on the NF7 made so much high-pitched noise that I replaced it with a passive Zalman. But, I digress....
Even after I loosened the timings on the RAM, the board would still fail Prime, albeit, taking more time to do so. As the mobo came with BIOS 20 installed, while the NF7 in my sig runs very well with BIOS 18, I flashed the NF7-S with BIOS 18 and things started to look a lot more promising. I still had problems maintaining a stable 220x11 at 2-2-2-11 - I'm guessing due to less voltage being supplied to the sticks - but maintained stability at 2-3-2-11, which is fine with me. To make a long story short, I think I've found a Prime-stable config at 218x11 (2.4GHz) @ 1.85V, and it's been Priming at that speed for the last 14 hours (priority 10), running 43C max.
As I'm about to receive the Raptor's, and seeing how several experienced members of this forum run them in RAID 0 with the NF7-S, I'm wondering if there are any helpful hints you could share. I'm also wondering if there are known SATA issues with BIOS 18.
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