M7NCG 400 Specs. and Bundle
- Supports all Socket-462 CPUs (including 200FSB Barton XP3200+)
Chipset
- NVIDIA nForce2 IGP North Bridge and MCP South Bridge
System Memory
- 2 x 184-pin DDR SDRAM
- DDR200 / DDR266 / DDR333 @ 2.50v (Dual Channel)
- 2GB maximum system RAM
Slots
- AGP slot, 8x AGP compliant
- 3 x 32-bit PCI 33MHz slots
On-board peripherals - I/O
- 2 Serial ports
- 1 Parallel port
- Mic-In, Line-In, Line-Out (serves as 6-channel support)
- RJ-45 LAN Port (Realtek RTL8100BL 10/100 LAN)
- 2 USB2.0 connectors on the back panel
- HD15 connection for onboard GeForce4 MX VGA
- PS/2 ports
On-board storage
- An IDE controller on the nForce2 MCP chipset provides IDE HDD/CD-ROM with PIO, Bus Master and Ultra DMA133/100/66/33 operation modes
Integrated Components
- Realtek RTL8201BL 10/100 LAN PHY
- GeForce4 MX GPU integrated into the North Bridge
- Realtek ALC650 5.1 sound CODEC
- Headers for another 4 USB2.0 ports
- 2 usable fan headers
- IrDA, CD-In, Aux-In connectors
BIOS & Voltages
- FSB speeds of 100Mhz - 250Mhz in 1MHz increments
- 1.3v - 2v VCore
- 2.5v - 2.8v VMem
- 1.5v - 1.8v VAGP adjustment
- 1.6 - 1.9v VDD adjustment
Bundle
There's not too much here to see. The manual is poor. It only devotes 12 pages to the English section and little of that has any real use. We can't see why every manufacturer cannot produce a decent manual. You wouldn't expect other consumer electronics to ship with poor documentation. We don't see why that should be the case with motherboards. The driver CD contains the various drivers needed, but they will now be outdated as the 3.13 chipset package is available from NVIDIA's website. The CD also contains Biostar's in-house overclocking utility, dubbed Warpspeeder, and an overclocking tool for NVIDIA's graphics. As a bonus, copies of Norton Ghost 2003 and Internet Security 2003 are provided. The cables are basic. A 2-port USB2.0 and single ATA133 and floppy cables finish off what is a budget-conscious package.
I've highlighted the fact that the board supports DDR333 dual-channel memory. It supports 200FSB CPUs but then doesn't accompany this with DDR400 DC memory usage. It's not a typo either. Biostar, apparently, has had to reduce the memory compliance to DDR333 to ensure that onboard graphics work with stability. There's two performance issues here. One is the lower bandwidth available at DDR333, albeit still a little more than the Athlon XP can use. The other, more important factor relates to the increased latencies resulting from clock buffering, that is, the nForce2 IGP having to modulate between the 200MHz CPU and 166MHz memory speeds. We'll see how this affects performance.
