Great Motherboard for older K7 AMD XP's.
Written: Jun 15 '05
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Onboard sound has to much PCI interference due to bad shielding issues
Cons: No SATA, but the newer Biostar M7NCD Ultra has that.
The Bottom Line: Higherly recommended if you want utter stability with an athlon XP-Mobile, and don't want to go with K8 754/939 yet.
|
|
|
| willtx42's Full Review: Biostar M7NCD Pro Motherboard |
I have used 27 of these in my shop as well as 35 Shuttle AN35N Ultras. Both are great Nforce2 boards. The reviewer below that has all of that experience seems to need a lot more experience. An XP2400, 2600, 2600 Mobile will run fine. What happened was the by default a mobile "multiplier" is set lower and with a lower CPU clock (and FSB). Once in the Bios with a mobile it is imperative that you "activate" - "expert" settings within with advanced section. From there you manually set your multiplier and drop the voltage a bit. Also this section (advanced) allows you to manually specify increments by 1 Mhz at a time. This guy below first off didn't realize what CPU he had initially and how to both activate and use the advanced section of the bios on the M7NCDP properly (all known by experienced performance users), and the entire purpose of having a mobile is to overclock it but still use lower voltage for lower heat output and higher clocks, and you would get PC3200 ram to run with it (at least of not PC3500-4000) at a 1:1 ratio @ 400/400, or raise the mutlipler and go with 266 or 333 FSB it's wide open with a mobile)
If you only have PC2100 ram (DDR266) then you can't overclock with you're FSB (DRAM) so what you would do is just go 140'ish with the FSB and raise the multi to 15X, and raise vcore to 1.5V. Set ram to manual "expert" and set it to 100% of the FSB to use a 1:1 ratio - cas 2.5 7-4-4 (modest timings).
I have had a mobile 2600 doing 2.5 Ghz with 1 Gig of HyperX PC3500 on this motherboard easily (you may need to remove the NB chipset heatsink and use some artic silver). the board is super easy to set up and overclock - provided you "really" know what you are doing. The manual though short is extremely easy to read and understand for an experienced person. "Could" be trouble for someone not very experienced. Someone else should have installed the board for the below bad review.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): $50.00 bulk
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
willtx42
|
|
Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.