Biostar M7NCD Pro

Introduction

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If you are building an AMD powered system these days chances are high that you will be using a motherboard using NVIDIA's excellent nForce2 chipset. Today I am taking a look at Biostar's second nForce2-based motherboard, the M7NCD Pro (the first has been reviewed here).

The features and the bundle

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The M7NCD Pro is one of the new nForce2 based motherboards that officially supports a 400 MHz FSB (front side bus) and thus also supports the new AMD AthlonXP 3200+ Barton CPU.

The feature list is:

• Support for 400 MHz FSP
• Support for 400 MHz Barton 3200+
• DualDDR 400 memory controller which gives us up to 6.4GB/s bandwidth
• AMD HyperTransport which enables 800 MB/s hi-speed bus between North and South bridges
• 6 USB 2.0 ports
• Realtek ALC650 6-Channel Audio
• 10/100 MCP NVIDIA MAC + Realtek RTL8201BL PHY
• 2xATA133 IDE-ports

Something that disappointed me was that there is no FireWire support (IEE1394). Most won't use it, but I really need it for my DV-camera. You also do not get any Serial-ATA or RAID-support. Last but not least, even though it supports 6-channel audio, it only has 3 audio connectors, Speaker Out, Line In and Mic. The NVIDIA APU also seems to be absent.

As with most other motherboards, Biostar also has some of its own proprietary features on this motherboard:

• WatchDog: The [WatchDog™] technology was designed to protect your PC under dangerous over-clock situations. Any over-clocking that reaches the threshold settings, the WatchDog Technology will automatically shut down the system
• FLASHER: BIOSTAR's [FLASHER™] technology integrates flash utility function onto BIOS firmware. The advantage is users do not need neither to enter DOS nor to prepare the utility. Just simply enter CMOS and do it.
• 9th Touch: Press F9 at boot and choose which device to boot from.
• WinFlasher: A new flashing utility allow users run the BIOS upgrade process easily under Windows environment
• WarpSpeeder: This powerful control panel features three user-friendly functions including Overclock Manager, Overvoltage Manager, and Hardware Monitor. All accessed inside Windows.

Some nice ideas here. I like being able to flash a new BIOS without hunting for that damn boot-floppy.

So what is in the box?

• The motherboard
• 1 IDE cable and 1 floppy cable
• 1 backplate with 4 USB ports
• 1 tiny manual
• CD with drivers and utilities
• CD with Norton Application Pack CD (Internet Security 2003( Norton AntiVirus™, Norton™ Personal Firewall, Norton™ Privacy Control, Norton™ Intrusion Detection, Norton™ Parental Control) and Norton™ Ghost 2003
• CD with Biostar's StudioFun

Something that is missing is that little backplate you get with cut-outs for all the different ports. Fortunately, it looks like it uses the standard layout since I had an old backplate that happened to fit perfectly, but I still think it is cheap not to supply one.


Utilities
Biostar ships the motherboard with a few utilities. Winbond HWDoctor helps you monitor the fans, the temp and various voltages. It works well. WarpSpeeder is, as I wrote above, a program that allows you to change various settings from Windows instead of in the BIOS. You can increase the voltage, change FSB and even change the multiplier. Or you could if you could get it to run. Everytime I tried to run the program, it produced a memory access error and then a blue screen. The idea behind WarpSpeeder is great, but unfortunately I cannot verify how well it works.

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