Leadtek's nForce II - K7NCR18D Pro

Author : Martyn Date : 18th December '02

...Product	K7NCR18D [Pro]
...Manufacturer	Leadtek
...Supplier	Leadtek
...Price	TBC

 

 

 

Part Four: Up Close and...[2]

The board itself was very well presented indeed. For a company much more familiar with graphics cards it's surprising to see the appearance of this board competing with the best.

...certainly looks good so far.

Leadtek have fashioned a great looking heatsink of the north bridge.

One AGP 8X slot alongside four PCI slots and an ACR slot, expansion potential is assured.

A reasonable amount of room is available around the socket, that lower power connection looks a tad troublesome though...

The familiar colour-coded rear of the board. All the usual features including the nForce's superb 5.1 audio.

The IDE and floppy connections are very near the bottom edge of the board; this can lead to cabling woes for users with a full tower case.

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The overall layout of the Leadtek board can be described as satisfactory. There are some major issues that may prevent an easy instalation, firstly, as mentioned above, the IDE ports are right at the bottom of the board. Using Aopen's HQ80 full tower case means it's very hard indeed to find long enough cables to reach from the mainboard up to the CD drives. You will also need a very long floppy cable indeed. Users employing a midi style case will have little issue though.
Secondly the ATX power header is poorly placed. It promotes very untidy cabling (thus poor air flow) and means those using water or other less conventional CPU cooling methods may need to check their equipment fits. We had planned to use this board in our Prometeia test system but found the power connection narrowly hit our AMD CPU kit. If we discount those flaws, the board's layout is very good indeed. Leadtek have done a good job with the presentation here.

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