First off, this is a review of the NF7-S revision 2 board. First, some of the features: nVidia nForce2 chipset with the full audio setup, SATA, IEEE1394 (Firewire) and Ethernet.

The SATA controller is a Silicon Image 3112A chip, which is supported in the 2.4.22 and later 2.4 series kernels, and it is also supported in the 2.6 series. If you install a distribution that lacks SATA support you will have to install on a traditional (parallell) IDE controller and then build a kernel with SI3112A support and move it over to the SATA drive by whichever means you prefer.

The support for SATA and nVidia IDE is pretty poor in the kernel. Sure it works, but SATA and traditional IDE performance on my NF7-S with a Barton 2800+ CPU is on par with the 5400rpm drive in my 366MHz laptop! hdparm -T, no matter what settings I use (and believe me, I have tried *many*) reports transfer speeds of about 26MB/s. In comparison, my old Asus A7V (950MHz Athlon) with the Promise 20265 ATA100 controller, produces 59MB/s with the same disk! So the nVidia IDE and SiliconImage kernel drivers still has lots of room for improvement.

Onboard sound and Ethernet is provided through the nForce2 chipset. These do not work straight out of the box since there are no stable open source drivers for them yet (there is an experimental network driver though), so you will have to get the drivers from nVidia's driver page or FTP server by some other means (hey, got a spare network card lying around?) and then install it.

The nVidia drivers work well. I usually compile my own kernels and I have never had any problems building the .tar.gz-packaged driver modules against my own kernel source tree. After making the drivers, a simple modprobe for each driver will bring both Ethernet and audio online. The last time I downloaded and installed the drivers they had a new and simplified (automated) installation which should please most users.

I have not yet tested more than two speakers with the nVidia Linux drivers, but I have heard it works. Don't take my word for it though.

Network performance is excellent with the nVidia drivers. I can fully saturate my 100MBit home network without much effort, and CPU usage is not as high as with many other cards.

IEEE1394 appears to work OK, but since I don't have any Firewire devices I cannot verify this.


Final words: Very disappointing disk performance in Linux, but hopefully this will improve with updated drivers. Excellent integrated network controller, and pretty good audio. If you use Gentoo you should have no problems installing Linux on a SATA disk since you build your own kernel during the installation process. Just don't use the generic Gentoo kernel sources since they are at 2.4.20 at this time and do NOT support the Silicon Image controlle.

Here is a link to the drivers for the nvidia motherboard chipset:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_nforce_1.0-248.html


Hope this helps.

This is a fairly easy motherboard to get working with linux. Just make absolutely sure you are using a kernel newer than 2.4.19 otherwise you will have to patch the source and recompile it yourself, which is a pain.

Regards,
-Kilka

I can't comment on the sound of the NF7-S rev2 board but having to install the nvidia drivers for the chipset is a little futile since I have a better soundcard so I havent bothered with it. So a Realtek NIC is used instead of the onboard one.

No conculsion on the SATA yet neither. Iaware of the SATA issues of this board)
But everything else I've had no problems.

Just a few additions regarding compatibility and usability, a few months later:

I run this board now without any problems at all, and I get great performance from it. I no longer use any of Nvidia's binary drivers but rather the forcedeth module (in the main kernel since 2.6.3) for the onboard network controller and ALSA snd-intel8x0 for sound. Works a treat for me (use alsaconf to have the module options setup automatically).

I also recently switched from using the regular kernel sil3112 driver to the libata (quasi-SCSI). libata works really well and I get about 53MB/s throughput on my Seagate SATA disk. My other disk, a regular PATA Seagate, is still /dev/hda and works fine using the amd74xx/nforce IDE option in the kernel.

There is really no reason not to buy this board if you're going for an Athlon XP-based setup.

I've had this NF7v2 board for about a year and have had no trouble with it. The LAN and sound worked with no problem. Video provided by a GeForce FX 5200 lite version 128mb in the agp slot.

A very good card.

I've had NF7-M board,Can i install linux- system?