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Chaintech Summit 7NIF2 Mainboard BIOS While the 7NIF2 is billed as a budget motherboard, Chaintech does include some overclocking options in the BIOS. I'll have to admit though that at first I was slightly confused with the BIOS setup until I realized that there are built in settings as well as allowing you to determine the speeds and frequencies. The initial BIOS screen is pretty standard here as you can see, with options Standard CMOS, Advanced BIOS, Advanced Chipset, etc.., etc.
The Advanced BIOS menu is pretty standard as well, with settings for boot order, Quick on PWR Test, etc. What we really want to see though is the Advanced Chipset Features so we can find out how many ways there are for us to break something, right? The first thing you'll notice in this menu is the system Performance tag (probably because it's at the top right?) This is actually the first place that you notice the built in tweaking functions for the board. There are 4 settings here, "Optimal", "Aggressive", "Turbo", and "Expert".
In order to tweak the system to your specs you'll have to set this to "Expert". (I felt a little guilty about doing this, almost like I was lying under oath;) Once done, the other overclocking options are unlocked for you to play with. The memory timings also have the same preloaded menu options. The Front Side Bus is adjustable in 1 MHz increments from 100 all the way up to 200MHz. And while many of you are bound to be saying "it's ok, but not that great", you're correct, but remember what I said before, this is Chaintech's budget nForce2 board. To be honest I was a little surprised that the BIOS allowed for as much tweaking as it did.
You'll notice that there are no voltage adjustments here. Nor are an AGP/PCI lock. While this board is overclockable, it's not by much. This final shot here is of the PC Health screen in the BIOS. Pretty standard here too, temp and voltage readings and allows you to set a shutdown temp which is always pretty cool. The bottom line shutdown temperature is only 85 degrees C though. Performance As with every other motherboard the bottom line is going to come down to performance. In order to see what this thing can do we're going to run it through a battery of tests and see how it stacks up. As a base line comparison we'll be using the EPoX 8K9A board based on the KT400 chipset, which Dean reviewed a while back. We will be running the Chaintech board through the test sequence twice, once utilizing the onboard VGA and then in order to give it a fair and impartial review, we'll be strapping in our trusty ABIT Siluro GF4. Benchmarks
Test System
As with all hardware, the results we get may be better or worse than the ones you may get. Our aim is to give you some points of reference to use as you will.
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