Thoughts
I believe we've proved that it's a fallacy to state microATX boards cannot compete with full-blown desktop offerings in most respects. Manufacturers have become acutely aware that the form factor is an important criteria in the decision-making process of potential buyers. Couple up a mATX board housed in a small case, add in a TFT, stylish keyboard, mouse and multi-speaker set, and you'll soon have systems that the average consumer would like to own. The Small Form Factor systems have adequately shown that high specification machines need not be housed in antiquated cases.Biostar's two mATX boards reviewed today highlighted that stability was a non-issue as far as either motherboard was concerned. That's perhaps the most important point. Reducing PCB size shouldn't, and doesn't, impact on the key area of stability under prolonged load. Each board had its individual idiosyncrasies, but every board does. We've yet to meet the perfect motherboard in three years of reviewing.
The nForce2-powered M7NCG 400 is a strange beast. On the one hand it supports the 200FSB Barton straight out of the box. On the other, though, it's only rated to support dual-channel DDR333 memory. We feel that takes away most of the performance advantages of running high FSB speeds on an AMD K7 architecture. The cumulative effects of high latencies incurred by clock buffering and the lower bandwidth delivered by DC DDR333 almost negate the need for an XP3200+. One might as well place a Barton XP3000+ in the socket. That's especially true with the GPU-bound onboard graphics. With the onboard graphics used, it refused to run with DC DDR400 memory, irrespective of settings.
The M7NCG400 was adequate on the features' count, but we feel as if Biostar needs to address the documentation that it ships with. A 12-page English manual is forced into brevity on important issues, especially the BIOS. We also feel as if Biostar missed the boat by not incorporating a S-Video socket on the I/O panel. It's a good board, but it had the potential to be a whole lot better.
The Athlon 64 3200+ / nForce3 150 K8NHA-M is the first Socket-754 board we've come across that allows the user to input manual DRAM timings. Performance with 2.5-6-2-2 latencies was suitably impressive, and it became the fastest Clawhammer board to date. Whereas performance excelled, the feature count could do with a makeover. We'd like SATA support, FireWire and S/PDIF input / output as standard. The problem with the K8NHA-M isn't necessarily the board - it's the CPU. The barrier to Athlon 64 entry arrives in the form of a £330 CPU price tag. We wish AMD would release lower-graded A64 CPUs immediately. It's only then that the S754 motherboard platform can truly flourish. We'd also be keen to see NVIDIA launch an upgraded, integrated GPU with the nForce3 line. That, though, doesn't look all that plausible with a single-chip bridge.
We hope that this has been an illuminating insight into the world of powerful mATX boards. Biostar knows how to manufacture decent boards. Let's now hope that they can extend each board's value by looking at some of the shortcomings we've pointed out here. A good start, however.
- M7NCG400
- K8NHA-M