Biostar M7NCD Pro Motherboard

The nForce2 chipset is...

Strengths: Feature rich, Recognized name, affordable price

Weakness: Documentation. Poor installation instructions and incomplete. The doc included in the box and that downloaded from the site have small differences. Not for first time builders

The nForce2 chipset is outstanding. I was lucky to have a correct i/o plate on my codgen case, otherwise I'd been pissed. Instructions are just poor, both in content and illustration. My Soltek board came with over 100 pages of info, all in english and useful. This board came with just 12 english pages and had to suppliment it with the site manual. At 40% less cost of the soltek, this board is...
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The nForce2 chipset is outstanding. I was lucky to have a correct i/o plate on my codgen case, otherwise I'd been pissed. Instructions are just poor, both in content and illustration. My Soltek board came with over 100 pages of info, all in english and useful. This board came with just 12 english pages and had to suppliment it with the site manual. At 40% less cost of the soltek, this board is well worth it. With nforce2 memory speed, 3 memory banks, and plenty of upgradable cpu speed room, this will be a mobo that will not be obsolete any time soon. Would buy again

By notromllib - Nov 16, 2003

I set this board up with the...

Strengths: Stable board. Great Overclocking features. Excellent price (especially with rebate). Onboard video if you need it.

Weakness: Temperature and voltage values seem inaccurate. No raid. No SATA.

I set this board up with the following components. Retail Barton 2500+ Stock Heatsink and Fan 512 mb pc3200 ram (Crucial) Geforce 3 video card Seagate 80mb Hardrive 7200 RPM Lite-on CDRW 450 Watt Power Supply I was very impressed with this board and it's features at this price. I didn't have any compatibility issues at all and found it to run very stable. I was able to overclock the Barton to...
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I set this board up with the following components.

Retail Barton 2500+
Stock Heatsink and Fan
512 mb pc3200 ram (Crucial)
Geforce 3 video card
Seagate 80mb Hardrive 7200 RPM
Lite-on CDRW
450 Watt Power Supply

I was very impressed with this board and it's features at this price. I didn't have any compatibility issues at all and found it to run very stable. I was able to overclock the Barton to 2244 MHz and have it run flawlessly with just the stock cooler. The bios has nice overclocking features for the CPU and Ram. It also came with a simple windows based bios updater which was very nice and easy to use. My one complaint is that the temperature and voltage monitor seems to show values that are erratic and jump around very quickly. It's difficult to determine which value is true. If you don't want or need some of the higher end features of other boards, or are putting a system together for someone else, this is a great board. The price is excellent at $51 after rebate.

By friedmoney - Oct 29, 2003

This is a good board for the...

Strengths: Easy install; boots fast and loads very easily. Pretty board through the window!

Weakness: No I/O shield so you may have to mod your case shield.

This is a good board for the price. It's does have all the bells and whistles of other NF2 boards but a lot of us don't use most of those anyway. Get this before the end of November for the $15 rebate. You can't go wrong for the price vs. features!

By jeff_connors - Nov 8, 2003

I have already told my friends...

Strengths: This motherboard is very quick. It was very easy to install XP-2500 and heatsink-fan along with DDR Ram. The BIO's update flasher is easy to use also. Its simple, straight forward and overclocks well.

Weakness: Wish they had included a I/O shield for the back of the tower and a quick install guide.

I have already told my friends about this motherboard. How easy it is to work with and its overclocking abilities. No frills here, I'm using a XP-2500 CPU with PC-3200 DDR Ram, 80gb 133ATA HD and a NVidia FX 5200, 128 MB video card. Yes, done on a budget but works very well and is fast. The Biostar M7NCD Pro makes this system ROCK. If your looking for a inexpensive NVidia board, this is it.

By Silverstre11053 - Oct 25, 2003

You can't beat if for the price...

Strengths: Stable & fast MoBo with very good overclocking potential. Good bundled software package: Norton aplication pack CD.

Weakness: No RAID/SATA, but hey, for a ~$50 (AR) nForce2 Ultra400 MoBo, what more would you like?? Biostar support has a lot to grow, but likely you'd not need it.

You can't beat if for the price with the $15 MF rebate that appears on & off. It's a great MoBo: stable and fast performer, very good overclock ability (BIOS adjustments). It may lack some features (RAID, SATA) but you can still purchase PCI controller(s) and stay well below the price tag of other MoBos with those features integrated onboard. Other nForce2 MoBos had reportedly been picky about...
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You can't beat if for the price with the $15 MF rebate that appears on & off.
It's a great MoBo: stable and fast performer, very good overclock ability (BIOS adjustments). It may lack some features (RAID, SATA) but you can still purchase PCI controller(s) and stay well below the price tag of other MoBos with those features integrated onboard.
Other nForce2 MoBos had reportedly been picky about the RAM, this one is quite unpretentios in this regard: mine has worked fine with PNY, Crucial, & Kingston ValueRAM.

Norton aplication pack CD has: Internet Security 2003: Norton™ Personal Firewall, Norton™ Privacy Control, Norton™ Intrusion Detection, Norton™ Parental Control; *Norton™ Ghost 2003; *Norton AntiVirus™ (only 90 days updates).

If you're on the market for a nForce2 MoBo get one of these!
NB: the non-Pro version has a crippled down BIOS (overclicking) capability.

By fwd1 - Oct 12, 2003