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Leadtek
K7NCR18D-Pro - Up Close and Personal |
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Under the Hood |
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The Bundle
The Leadtek can't even touch the
Chaintech when it comes to the packaging. The bonus of
this being that it can be had for $104 on Pricewatch.
Let's take a look at the goodies offered with the Leadtek.
The Leadtek is packed in a
normally sized motherboard box. Upon opening it you
find the motherboard encased in a plastic static guard bag.
Below the motherboard we find the rest.
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As you can see the Leadtek
bundle is fairly simple. The SPDIF is provided along
with a Firewire card that supports three more IEEE-1394a
ports. You only get one ATA 133 EIDE cable, which I
found surprising. I would say a majority of the PC
Enthusiast crowd would need at least two EIDE cables.
Some extra jumpers are thrown in, which isn't too noteworthy
considering most boards today, including this one, are jumperless. The manual provided is so-so. I
would say you need some intermediate know-how to go along with
this manual. The software thrown in is Ulead Cool 3D
v3.0 and Ulead Visual Studio 6 for DVD playback. So,
overall not too impressive, but everything you need to have
complete a solid workstation.
Under The Scope:
Layout and Features
On to the motherboard itself.
You will also notice that the feature set included on this
motherboard isn't quite up to the level of what's offered by the Chaintech
board. Let's have a look.
The I/O ports on the back are
pretty much identical to the Chaintech's minus the gold.
Two USB 2.0 ports and 10/100 Ethernet which is provided by
the Southbridge MCP-T chip. Again we see here that the
Leadtek does not take advantage of the second 3Com Ethernet
MAC. On board sound is provided by the built in NVIDIA
"SoundStorm", offering 5.1 Encoding, a game port and SPDIF
support.
The Leadtek K7NCR18D-Pro comes with no SATA or RAID support. Just the standard Primary and
Secondary EIDE connectors are available. The location
of the ATX 12v adapter is not the best once again. The
possibility of the wires coming from the power supply, being
draped over the HSF, is still there. As with the Chaintech,
the metal can type capacitors, located around the CPU socket, don't leave
much room for an aftermarket heatsink. The AGP slot
and memory slots provide more room to work with on the
Leadtek and removal of memory modules is possible, without
the removal of the graphics card.
The BIOS
This Leadtek board uses the Phoenix
Technology's Award BIOS, which seems to be the BIOS of choice
for nForce2 boards. This BIOS is not as adjustable as
the Chaintech's, but you get the settings needed to get a
good overclock going. The FSB offers selections up
to 200MHz in 1MHz increments. The AGP slot has three
settings: Default, +0.1V, and +0.2V. Sadly enough, the
DIMM voltage cannot be adjusted at all. With that in
mind, you're going to want to install high quality memory
modules in this board, if you hope to achieve a decent overclock. The lock
for the AGP timing is available, but the PCI is always locked
at the 66/33MHz setting. That is posted on startup so
you can at least see that is the case, unlike the Chaintech.
I was able to get the Leadtek up to a 192MHz FSB with the
CPU voltage set at 1.85V. Again, the cooling was
holding me back here. With some extra cooling, I
believe the Leadtek could also hit the 200MHz FSB setting.
Let's see how these boards
tested shall we. Off to the setup and benchmarking.
Setup and Benchmarking
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