Leadtek K7NCR18D PRO II

Even though many of us probably first heard about Leadtek three to four years ago, they actually have been around since 1986. They do not only make the WinFast Series of graphics cards but also motherboards (they actually used the original nForce for their first motherboards), TV Tuners and many other pieces of hardware.

We have reviewed quite a few pieces of hardware from them:

• Winfast A170 DDR T
• Winfast A180 DDR TH (GF4MX 440)
• WinFast A250 Ti4400
• Winfast A250 Ultra TD GF4 Ti4600 MyVIVO Edition
• Winfast A300 Ultra TD MyVIVO
• Winfast TV2000 XP
• Winfast TV2000 XP Deluxe
• Winfast K7N420DA Motherboard
• Winfast K7NCR18D-Pro nForce2 Motherboard
• Winfast K7NCR18G-Pro nForce2 Motherboard

As you can see from the last item listed, we have already reviewed the first generation of this board. Not much has changed on the board since that review EXCEPT the nForce2 Ultra 400 being the new chipset. The difference between the nForce2 and the Ultra 400 is that NVIDIA has worked hard with the board makers to make sure the design of the board could handle 400MHz FSB (front side bus) and an improved version of the nForce2.

I won’t bore you with the complete specs of this motherboard. They can be found at Leadtek's site. The interesting specs of this motherboard are:

• CPU Support: AMD Athlon/XP/Barton/Duron Socket A processor running at a bus frequency between 200 to 400 MHz (DDR)
• Chipset: NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400 + NVIDIA nForce2 MCP-T
• Memory support: Supports 3 184 -pin DIMM sockets for DDR -SDRAM module (PC2100, PC2700, PC3200)
• GF4 MX graphics
• 2 SATA ports
• 3 IEE1394 FireWire ports
• Second LAN port
• Optical fiber by SPDIF
• RR/RL & Center/Bass audio jack

One interesting thing to note is that if you read Leadtek's listed specifications at the link above, they do not list 200 MHz support in their CPU support list. I think they just copied over the old list from the K7NCR18G-Pro and forgot to add the newer CPUs.