nForce2 6-way Motherboard Roundup - December 2002

Leadtek K7NCR18D: Stress Testing

There were plenty of memory divider options available in the BIOS for us to test this board in several different areas and configurations, including:

Front Side Bus Stress Test Results

Our FSB stress tests went without issue at 176MHz FSB. The K7NCR18D had no trouble going through 24 hours of Prime95 torture tests without a single failure. As usual, we had Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 Arena and Jedi Knight II demos running one after another with Prime95 crunching in the background. In addition, we performed some general work like data compression in addition to light Word and Excel apps. SPECviewperf and XMPEG were also run to further stress test the K7NCR18D to see if it would crack. Despite it all, the Leadtek K7NCR18D was as solid as a rock in the limited stress testing we conducted at 176MHz FSB. We wonder how much higher the K7NCR18D would have gone had there been CPU multiplier options in the BIOS.

Memory Stress Test Results

This first memory stress test tests how the Leadtek K7NCR18D is able to handle DDR333 speeds at aggressive timings with all memory banks occupied. Here were our results:

There are very impressive timings for three memory modules running at 333MHz. No surprise though, as all the nForce2 boards we've tested up to this point have been able to operate with these exact same memory settings.

The following chart lists the highest frequency we were able to reach at the following memory timings with all memory banks occupied. Here were our results:

The highest we could get with the K7NCR18D was 376MHz with three DIMMs operating at these timings. This frequency is certainly noticeably below the average for an nForce2 board, but still decent nonetheless.

Our memory overclocking results for the K7NCR18D were similarly unspectacular. Here were our results:

We ran our usual set of memory "stressmarks" to ensure that our memory timings and memory frequencies were reliable enough to mimic prolonged operation. Therefore, we first started out by conducting 24 hours straight of Prime95 torture tests. Then, we moved on to Super Pi stress tests in addition to rerunning benchmarks like SPECviewperf 7.0 and XMPEG. All in all, the K7NCR18D proved to be quite reliable at the above listed memory timings and frequencies for us to be able to proclaim the Leadtek K7NCR18D stable at these settings.

SoundStorm Stress Test Results

We ran the same sound tests on the K7NCR18D as we did with all the other nForce2 motherboards tested here today. The following demos were each run three times with SoundStorm enabled:

As we previously mentioned, there have been some minor, ongoing issues with NVIDIA's nForce1 APU drivers since the nForce1's introduction last year. Some users have experienced a Blue Screen of Death with nForce sound enabled in games like Unreal Tournament. However, the latest nForce2 unified driver package (v 2.00) has seemingly fixed the sound issues that nForce1 users were experiencing. This is backed up by our own stress test results, which show that SoundStorm is able to smoothly play five of some of the most popular games out there, including Unreal Tournament (which experienced the previously mentioned sound issues before the 2.00 drivers were released).