Over the past few months there has been a glut of nForce 2 motherboard reviews, as this is considered one of it not the fastest Athlon motherboard right now.  The reviews that we here at Viperlair have done has left us pretty impressed with the feature set that nVidia has incorporated into the base nForce 2 motherboard design.  

    Additions such as onboard 5.1 Dolby Digital sound, Dual channel DDR memory, the ability to lock the AGP/PCI bus speed, and in most cases the ability to unlock the TBred chips multiplier's for higher FSB speeds.  These all have made nForce 2 motherboards a hit with most users, from the overclocker to the OEM who are looking for integrated products with very nice specifications.  Thus even if you get an integrated nForce 2 motherboard the quality is pretty good.

    Leadtek, in reverse of companies such as MSI and Chanitech has moved from providing video cards only, to diversifying to motherboards as well.  The first products that Leadtek released in the way of motherboards was based on the original nForce chipset.  Apart from the nForce based chipset Leadtek has not made any other motherboards, such as for the Pentium IV or VIA or SIS based chipsets for the AMD Athlon platform.

    As we know that the nForce 2 performs very well, so how well did Leadtek design this motherboard, can it prove itself better than other motherboards?  Let us look at one of the few motherboards that Leadtek makes.

The WinFast K7nCR18D PRO

    First lets look at the design of the board, to see if there is any distinguishing points in the design.  Does it have a large software bundle or is it very colorful, like many of MSI's motherboards?  Or does it come with a multitude of extra pieces with it?  Lets see, and if you want to look at the specifications of this nForce 2 motherboard please .

    So what do you get with this motherboard?  Here is an itemized list.

• The motherboard
• Manual and Driver CD
• ACR Firewire (IEEE1394) card
• SPDIF output connector
• I/O back plate
• One Floppy connector, One ATA-133 IDE cable

The Motherboard - Continued

    Upon first glance at this motherboard and the box, you would assume that it was just another ordinary motherboard.  There is no coloring of the motherboards PCB which those with case windows will be disappointed by.  The extra features that are included in the package are nice, but nothing to be extremely excited about with a SPDIF output connector for connecting the system directly to your Dolby Digital receiver, and a Firewire card, one that actually uses the almost unused ACR slot.  

    The 1/4/1 (AGP 8X/PCI/ACR) configuration is a little less than is usually expected out of a motherboard, but as was just mentioned the ACR slot is used for a Firewire card, removing (in my case at least) one PCI card from use in this system.  However, why they didn't put another PCI slot in is unknown as there is room for it, or at least theoretically there is.  

    This leads to the memory slots and as is standard with all nForce 2 motherboards there is three slots in total, though when you want to use dual channel memory you have to use one of the top two DIMM slots and the bottom DIMM slot together.  Another thing to notice in the above image is the location of the AGP slot in relation to the DIMM slots.  Because Leadtek didn't add the 5th PCI slot there is more than adequate room to put a extremely long video card, such as the GeForce 4 Ti4600, while still being able to remove the memory without a problem.

    Here we see the 'north' and 'south' bridges that Leadtek had chosen to use on this motherboard.  Gladly Leadtek decided to use the MCP-T 'southbridge', instead of the less costly MCP, which doesn't have the integrated 5.1 audio from the nVidia chipset or the integrated firewire support offered by the chipset.  The chipset itself was dated in the 42nd week of 2002, and is a A3 stepping of the chipset.

    The SPP is cooled by a heatsink only, with no fan cooling the heatsink and making noise.  The heatsink and the SPP have a good layer of thermal paste between them as can be seen in the above pictures.  The heatsink is connected to the motherboard by means of two plastic push pins, not unlike that of many video card heatsinks.

    The CPU socket area is the last physical area that we will consider.  The CPU socket itself has a adequate amount of room around it, and more importantly you can notice the four mounting holes around the CPU socket, which means that heatsinks such as the Alpha PAL-8045T does fit though it comes very close to the .  However the ATX power connector is in one of the worst places, right above the CPU socket and may be too close for some heatsinks, and even if it isn't the power cable still has to go over the CPU heatsink/fan.

The BIOS

    The BIOS itself is one of the more important aspects of a motherboard, as you spend most of your time tweaking time in here.  So what special menus does this motherboard have?  We will focus on the more important menus, and not really look at the standard menus that every motherboard has.

        The main menu shows the menu options that are available in the menu, that leads you to the other menus which we will look at, such as PC Health Status (O.T.S), X-BIOS II, and Advanced Chipset Features.

    The advanced chipset menu is where most of the overclocking efforts will occur.  Here you can adjust you FSB frequency and has the ability to increase the frequency in 1MHz increments.  The memory frequency can be adjusted to many different frequencies, from 75% - 200% depending on your FSB.  You are given a large variation in memory timings, for instance with the RAS settings you are given a range from 1 to 15, and the CAS latency goes from 2 to 3.  Another interesting feature found in many nVidia based motherboards is the ability to control the AGP bus speed, from 50MHz to 100MHz. 

    This menu has some of the least options but provides some of the most information that can help you keep you computer up and running.  You can only change the CPU warning and shutdown temperatures and there is not much else in this menu.  What options does the "X-BIOS II" screen have, is it filled with options to change the multiplier of the CPU or other features?

    Here there is only two options for changing the voltage, first for the CPU and the AGP slot.  The CPU voltage ranges from 1.1 volts all the way up to 2 volts going in 0.025 volt increments.  The AGP voltage can only be raised by 0.2 volts but this should be adequate for most users.  What is interesting is the lack of CPU multiplier options, or any RAM voltage options.

Overclocking

    One thing that many people who build their own systems is overclockability.  The combination of nForce 2 chipset which can change the multiplier of many TBred processors, and the lower speed grade Athlon XP's, has produce some of the better FSB and processor speed overclocks.  But how well did our Athlon XP 1800 Thoroughbred overclock on this motherboard.  

    Unfortunately there were a few things that limited the overclockability of this motherboard.  First the lack of any multiplier adjustments meant that this was only a FSB increase with a correlating clock speed increase as well.  However there was also some good points to this motherboard in this area.  The maximum CPU voltage of 2v is higher than most motherboards by about 0.15v, so overclocking should have a slightly higher limit.  The ability to lock the AGP/PCI bus allows for better overclocks in the area between 133 and 166MHz.  But as we can see from the WCPUID screenshot above, the maximum overclock was 1831MHz, though it seemed to be limited to a FSB under 160MHz.  Without the ability to change the multiplier I could not make sure that this was not a CPU limit, though the fact that this screenshot was taken with a CPU voltage of 1.74v so there is plenty of voltage headroom still available.  The system would not even get to the BIOS when we moved to 160MHz or above even with the voltage raised to >1.8v.  Another annoying overclocking point is that sometimes you have to turn off the computer and reboot before any of the overclocked settings work properly.  Even though this motherboard supposedly supports multiplier adjustments now, from what the product page says, I found no way to change the multiplier in the BIOS (with the latest BIOS 5/22/03) or with the overclocking software provided.  With my Barton 2500+ and the FSB jumper set at 166MHz I have been able to reach at least a 200MHz FSB.

Benchmark System

The Truespace benchmark used the same process mentioned in my previous article using the following settings, the image was then rendered to 1600*1200.  The DivX tests took the video from the DVD of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (NSTC) which equaled 8555 frames without any audio being encoded.  For the TMPGEnc test we took the same video, but added its audio and ran used the settings shown here.  For the DUMeter tests, we took about 3GB of files (about 3000 files) ranging in size from a couple of KB's to a couple of hundred MB's.  We sent the data to and from the system using, in the case of the network cards, a 10/100 switch and the master network card was the Gigabit NIC on the MSI 845PE.  So let us see how this motherboard performs compared to other motherboards and other video cards.

Gaming/Networking Benchmarks

Unreal Tournament 2003

    This game has some of the best graphics of current games, and as such is very stressful, both on the CPU and the Video card.  So the test we are running is at 640*480 so that the video card is taken out of the equation, at least as much as it can.  So how does the motherboard work compared to other systems?

    We can see that apart from the integrated graphics of the Chaintech nForce 2 motherboard the performance difference between the three motherboards is about 2.3%.  This shows little differences in motherboards, and looking at the two nForce 2 boards there isn't that in the way of difference between the motherboards, about 1% or less.  Compared to the SiS 745 based motherboard there is only a 2% difference, which isn't much.  Overall the difference can be put down to all the random variables that appear in tests.

Jedi Knight II

    Based on the Quake III engine, this game has been shown to use most of the available memory bandwidth given to it.  So how does the Dual channel nForce 2 chipset do here?  Lets see...

   Here we see a difference start to make an appearance.  The SiS based chipset provides about 84 fps average, while the lowest nForce 2 (non-integrated) score is about 8fps extra.  The Leadtek motherboard does better than the Chaintech motherboard, by about 7fps which is pretty good considering that the difference between a older chipset and the current high end chipset is about the same.  

Networking Tests

    A device that is becoming much more common currently is the network card.  Many people are using cable or DSL internet, and as such more than one computer need to be connected to each other.  This has also brought about the sharing of files and for the business professional who has been using a network for years to make backups, speed is something that is needed and appreciated.  So how does the nVidia network card fair in our tests?

    For the networking portion of the test we see a difference in the two systems.  The Leadtek version has a better download speed than the Chaintech motherboard, but the reverse is true with the uploading test.  The firewire card had a better upload speed.  The limits of the upload speed may be due to the 4.3GB Quantum hard drive (ATA33) that was the boot drive.  Since games are only one area that people use their computers, what about some of the other facets of the computer user.

Other Benchmarks

Truespace 4.2 3D Rendering

    3D rendering has become a growing hobby for many, and in some cases the faster that a image can be rendered the better the picture and the quicker that you can make the rendered images.  So how does Truespace perform with the nForce 2 platform, as this is a 'beginners' program but still has most of the quality of the larger programs.

    What can we see with the Leadtek motherboard compared to the other two comparison motherboards?  While the Leadtek motherboard is the 'fastest' motherboard here, it takes the lead by just over 1% or well within the margin of error for the tests.  Compared to the SiS chipset the Leadtek motherboard is 4.5% faster, or about 1 render per hour faster.  

VirtualDub 1.4.10

    DivX video has become one of the best ways of encoding any type of video, with its high compression and pretty good quality, it has allowed for capture and video to small spaces while still maintaining high quality video.  DivX has also become very CPU dependent and as such faster CPU's render video much closer to real-time.  But how does the Leadtek motherboard perform in this intensive benchmark when we render at 720*480?

    We notice that just as with 3D rendering the Leadtek offering isn't that much faster than the comparable Chaintech offering.  However in this benchmark the dual channel nature of the nForce 2 motherboard shows for one of the first times a benefit.  There is a 1.8% increase with dual channel being enabled, though this can also be explained as being within the error range of the tests.  When compared to the SiS 745 based motherboard there is really a vast improvement, between a 17% and 20% increase in rendering speed.  What happens when we render video to a DVD compatible format?

TMPGEnc DVD Encoding

    DVD has become one of the most popular mediums currently, and with more DVD recorders becoming available, more people are looking to put their home video's on DVD.  Does the nForce 2 motherboard offer any improvement in this area, and more specifically does dual channel memory make any difference?

    The times mentioned here are based on the actual CPU time used by the program, as the actual time was much higher and more random.  Unlike with DivX rendering there isn't as much of an improvement in rendering times, between a 5% and 6% increase in rendering speeds, compared to the SiS chipset.  Here though dual channel memory has no real impact, with less than 1% of difference seen between the motherboards. Overall not much of a difference but in rendering it can make a difference, in one other case, using a DVD video (Spiderman, the first 5 minutes) the nForce 2 allows the system to render slightly faster than the PIV 2.4GHz.

Conclusion

    So what can we conclude about this motherboard.  Let us examine the major points of this motherboard, the design and packaging, quality of included extras, and its performance.

    First the design of the motherboard.  Leadtek decided to go with the best performing Athlon motherboard at the current time, which is always a good idea.  They also didn't decide to cheapen the motherboard by using the MCP-T and not the MCP 'south bridge'.  This addition brought the 5.1 onboard Dolby Digital encoding/decoding to the system, and with the help of the Realtek ALC650 CODEC provided full 5.1 digital audio.  The use of the MCP-T also provides support for onboard Firewire (IEEE1394) which uses the ACR slot, and allows you attach your Digital camcorder to your computer.  The inclusion of only 4 PCI slots isn't as good as many other motherboards, but if one of your cards is a Firewire card, then it is slightly better.  

    The hard drive and floppy connectors are placed at the bottom, which could pose a problem for those with a full tower case with the floppy drive on top.  The AGP slot has a retention mechanism, which is getting to be a standard feature in motherboards today, and this helps hold the video card in, even when moving from LAN party to LAN party.  Right next to the AGP slot is the RAM slots, which happen to be placed in some of the best locations, as you can add and remove memory without having to remove your video card such as the Ti4600 series.  Lastly the CPU socket area, here we see one of the nicer points and rarer additions to Athlon motherboards today, that of the four socket mounting holes.  The area around the CPU socket leaves enough space for even the Alpha PAL-8045T heatsink to fit, though with any heatsink it is a tight fit with the ATX power connector.  The ATX power connector is placed in a awkward area, which means that it has to go over the heatsink to return to the power supply.

    The BIOS is nothing out of the ordinary, though the ability to raise the core voltage up to 2.0 v is a very nice addition.  You can also increase the AGP voltage by 0.2v which isn't much but when you consider that the AGP voltage is either 0.8v or 1.5v that translates into a 13-25% increase in voltage.  However many will not need that voltage increase as in the BIOS there is the option to lock your AGP/PCI speed which allows you to use any hardware

    How did this motherboard perform?  To be honest there isn't that much of a difference between nForce 2 motherboards in performance and as such the victories that the Leadtek motherboard has are really not as important as compared to the SiS 745 chipset, which is much slower.  However the slim margin of victory means that Leadtek has taken the time to get the 'most' out of its motherboard, though it isn't really that much more.  The network speed was fairly good, uploading faster than the other cards, but downloading from the test machine at a slower pace than all but the DLink 10/100 network card.  Audio wise the system held up very well, with good quality for both MP3's, music CD's and DVD's as well.  The sound quality is on par with many sound cards out there.

    This motherboard is among the lower price range of nForce 2 motherboards (), and is one of the few in that price range that has the MCP-T on it.  

Good Points

• MCP-T
• nForce 2 chipset
• Socket mounting holes
• Good Overclocking potential
• Firewire
• Price

Bad Points

• No multiplier options
• Overclocking isn't good on 133MHz FSB processors
• Only 4 PCI slots
• No RAID or bundle
• Awkward ATX power location
• Drive connector location

Final Words

    This motherboard is a good performer, and for a low price as well, and has some overclocking potential.  However the lack of the ability to change the multiplier and the poor overclocking with a 133MHz FSB processor push it just out of range of a recommended award, though if you want a inexpensive and good nForce 2 motherboard this should be at the top of your list.