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There's nothing better than coming back from a mini reviewing sabbatical and having something nice land on the pile for your first article back. While I'd have been happy taking a look at a soundcard or a stick of memory, I fancied something more substantial to get back into the swing of things and Leadtek kindly obliged with their latest nForce2 solution, the K7NCR18G Pro. They had previously sent me their SPP version of this board but a slip up on my part meant the review didn't happen and the board had to go back.
But despite the problems before, they duly shipped the K7NCR18G (G denoting onboard graphics and being an nForce2 board that means the IGP version of the northbridge) and that's what I'm taking a look at today.
If all the talk of SPP, IGP and nForce2 has left you a little confused, I'll quickly recap on what makes up an nForce2 solution. The SPP and IGP are different versions of the same chip, the northbridge, which is responsible for the AGP controller and card interface, the CPU controller and related hardware such as the DASP and the memory controllers which make the nForce2 the best AMD chipset solution at the time of writing. Finally we have a HyperTransport link to the MCP southbridge which takes care of everything else, PCI bus controllers, USB, FireWire, Ethernet, audio and IDE interface (amongst other things).
The IGP adds an integrated graphics core to the SPP version of the bridge described above, interfacing with main system memory for its display memory and giving nForce2 a pretty much complete all in one solution as far as peripherals are concerned. It's quite possible to run an IGP nForce2 solution with no other AGP or PCI cards in the system, indeed it's something I've done during the course of this review, such is the amount of peripheral hardware the solution implements.
As you can tell, the board packs pretty much everything you'll need to get a basic system up and running, all you need to add is CPU, memory and a storage subsystem and you have a full PC. We should probably take a look at the complete spec!
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