Originally posted by: SlickoneI figured as much. Is the only reason everyone likes it because of it's overclocking?
I couldnt find any refurb NF7's, but what's up with newegg's "*NON-REFUNDABLE ITEM. Exchange for same Exact Item Only! " on new NF7's? Why buy there if they have this policy?
Well,
ease in overclocking is one aspect, but given the will a lot of boards can get near same o'c. I like Asus A7N8X myself but had to add a 12ga. wire to the back to keep the 5V rail for CPU power from dropping, and it doesn't support 5th multi, IIRC. NF7 doesn't have that problem, using 3 stage 12V rail for CPu, and due to Abit's capacitor defect fiasco of a few years back they still use better caps than they really need to (Rubycon MBZ a lot of the time) for a 3 stage VR. Out of the box that doesn't matter as much, but it will affect longevity.
Then there's the spacing of the first PCI slot, you don't HAVE to lose that slot with a thick AGP card, and the 5th multi support.
ON some of the 'boards marked as
exchange only I suspect too many people order a new board to rape it of the I/O shield and misc dongles, manual, then expect to return it. Granted with NF7 that's not as many dongles as with some but who knows, maybe they just have some percentage calculated, and if they working returns are higher than that, they flag it and won't refund anymore.
If you can't find a refurb and aren't in a hurry, you might just check back now and again, they've came and went pretty regularly over the past few months, though the discount for a refurb'd NF7 isn't much compared to many other boards, might be worthwhile to just get a new one. I'd have recommended the NF7-S but you didn't
need audio.