Abit AN7

[JimShady23]

Currently I am running an Abit NF7-S and am quit happy with it. But recently discovered that Abit came out with a new board similar to the NF7-S called the AN7. The specs on the board seem to be just about the same besides the GURU co-prossessor wich I am still a little foggy on as far as its funtuality. From what I understand from reading about it on the abit site is that it is basically like some gigabyte boards with a windows based overclocking software, and gives you options to adjust fan speeds and other hardware right in windows. I was just looking for insite on wether an upgrade to this board would be worth my time. Basically are the two boards identical besides the GURU chip ? And What is the main funtuality of the GURU chip...

Thanks For Your Time Guys.....

 

[Didou]

There is absolutley no need for you to go from the NFS-7 to the AN7. At one point it was supposed to use the MCP-S southbridge with had native SATA but this MCP still hasn't been finalised so Abit had to use an ad-on chip, so you still do not use SATA to its fullest potential with this board.

As for uGuru, it's only for people too lazy to go in the BIOS to overclock, all the monitoring features are available on the NFS with programs such Motherboard Monitor, etc.

 

[JimShady23]

Thanks for your insite on the mobo, and as you said neither board takes advantage of the onboard SATA. Noticed that with the RAID 0 Striped Config I have my 2 80 gig SATA drives at on my NF7-S seems to be noticably slower than boards with IDE Raid of the same configuration. Infact I notice barley any speed increase at all on boot up compaired to some just a stand alone SATA. With most IDE RAID setups windows is loaded at a blink of an eye... I also have 1.5 gig of PC2700 so I should be loading quicker than I am I do believe. Any insite on a alternative to get these SATA drives to the speed I expect them to be at ? I/O controller card ? Ect....?