problems with Biostar/Redfox M7NCG 400 nvidia 2 motherboard.

[Battousai1]

Just wanna share my experience with this board I got, and hopefully you guys might share some suggestions.

I just got a Redfox/Biostar M7NCG 400 Socket A motherboard last week, the board has an NVIDIA nForce2 IGP / MCP chipset, has an integrated GeForce 4 MX GPU with up to 128MB Frame Buffer, onboard sound, etc. I have installed 384 MB DDR RAM (128MB + 256MB) both are DDR266.

Here's my story and the problems I encountered:

I used a Duron 750Mhz. I had difficulties during the first time I installed and set-up the board, I cant get the board running (no screen, no boot up) after fiddling with the RAM I finally able to get the board running. (I never knew what is the cause of the problem, I cant conclude if its just a loosed ram or wrong jumper cause I made sure I installed everything properly, but after many trials I was able to get the board running and I added additional 256MB RAM)

After that I tried re-installing WinXP Pro, everytime winxp is about to install the files the system hangs goes to blue screen and restarts itself, it went that way for two days until I discovered that it was caused by the processor overheating due to improper installation of heatsink.

After the installation of Windows I noticed that the Windows loading screen the winxp logo with the loading blue bars is a little bit distorted and it takes a little bit long to load. I dont know if its with the harddisk cause the hdd simultaneously gone haywire with after installing the OS. What happened with the hdd is that it is being detected int he CMOS setup as as a different version and I needed to auto-detect the the disk twice in order for the correct version to be detected after a while I figured it out and fixed my disk by changing the jumpers to cable select and used a new IDE cable (the IDE cable instantly became busted simultaneously with the HDD with no apparent reason, and now I think the hdd is a little bit damaged because the jumper setting for master drive is not working anymore)

After all that, I managed to get everything work perfectly and smoothly. Now the only problems I have are:

1. Why is the speed of my processor not properly listed? it is clocked at 742-745Mhz when it should be at 750Mhz? is there something wrong with the board or should I change the settings? and Where can I find a bios update with this board? I just downloaded some updated bios on the board manufacturer Biostar/Redfox, but the onboard bios update utility detects the new bios as different

2. Is there an issue with PC266 RAMs? whats better to use the PC333 or the PC266 on this board?

3. Whats wrong woth WinXP's loading screen? and why did it take longer to load compared to my older/slower board?

Any comments on the M7NCG 400? And whats the good things about this board?

[Rocketmech]

Redfox Technology ??? never heard of them. They appear to be just a distributor that piggybacks their name on other manufacturers products, and there is no contact or support links on their website . Thats not trustworthy .
The motherboard is likely a genuine Biostar , so look for support there.

1. Try using the Optimized Bios Defaults or manually set the cpu settings.
2. If your planning on keeping the Duron , then DDR266 ram is fine.
3. You need to be sure you have loaded all the device drivers from the Biostar install CD or perhaps download updates from Biostar or from Nvidia .

[Battousai1]

Thanks for the reply!

Thanks for the reply! Right now Im fixing the driver problems with this GeForce 4 MX Integrated GPU, before I used the drivers supplied by the mobo manufacturer and it is so bad! mild graphics games are unplayable, after that I tried switching on the drivers supplied by winxp and fortunately it worked. And I decided to try the latest drivers (Forceware 78.01) from nvidia but the problem is somes games are getting buggy and windows is saying that the latest drivers (the 78.01) has not passed the logo testing (WHQL). right now Im looking for older drivers for this gpu... Im suppose to use the drivers supplied by winXP Pro but I'll try first the older drivers from nvidia the 52.xx i guess..

regarding the CPU clock, Im still trying to figure out why is the clock speed not listed properly, right now I tried manually setting the CPU speed and FSB...

Right now I was surprised.. I was able to overclock succesfully this Duron 750Mhz to 825mhz (just trying out) without any system crashes and without even overheating, I think maybe because of the board and the ram thats why I was able to overclock this, before I cant even push this duron pass 800mhz. on my old ECS KT133 mobo.

BTW I would liek to ask... whats the difference between the CPU speed and the CPU Clock? Is the CPU speed not constant while the CPU clock is? because I have installed an application that came from the mobo manufacture named "Warpspeeder" it is more of a monitoring software that takes its info from he hardware monitor of the board, it shows temp., voltage, cpu speed, cpu clock etc. On the CPU speed but it is constantly changing from 790-812Mhz.

[apocalypse]

CPU speed = Front Side Bus (FSB) x CPU Multiplier

The CPU speed will fluctuate a little, but the range that yours is changing from 790-812 is a pretty wide. My CPU which is running at 2500 Mhz will flucatuate from 2499.9 to 2502 and that is pretty normal.

To me, it sounds like the chipset is unstable or the utility is. Download CPU-z from here http://www.cpuid.org/cpuz.php and see if the speed fluctuates as well. That way you'll know if it the software or the hardware.

[Battousai1]

CPU speed = Front Side Bus (FSB) x CPU Multiplier

The CPU speed will fluctuate a little, but the range that yours is changing from 790-812 is a pretty wide. My CPU which is running at 2500 Mhz will flucatuate from 2499.9 to 2502 and that is pretty normal.

To me, it sounds like the chipset is unstable or the utility is. Download CPU-z from here http://www.cpuid.org/cpuz.php and see if the speed fluctuates as well. That way you'll know if it the software or the hardware.

I just overclocked the cpu a little bit further and I noticed that the fluctuation got shorter... but i'll try the cpu-z, i tried that copu-z before but that was a long time ago, thanks for reminding me again! btw I tried overclocking my cpu from 750 to 900 now. but windows and the software utility is detecting it as 902Mhz. when it is supposed to be 900mhz only (120Mhz FSB X 7.5).

BTW can I still further overclock this? I noticed that when I tried overcloking it a little bit further (121-122Mhz FSB) it sometimes crashes or restarts. Is it possible for me to increase the voltage? I never tried it before and I ust learned that increasing the voltage can further increase overclocked speeds (is this true?) and how far can this Duron (spitfire), M7NCG mobo, DDR 333,266 RAM can go with proper cooling and right voltage?

Regarding the CPU temperature. Before when when it was on the 750Mhz cpu speed the temp. is 50-52 degrees, when I overclocked it noticed that the temperature just increased slightly (49-52 degrees). what I did was I lapped the heat sink and then I re-applied a thermal paste then I tried overclocking it to 900Mhz with temperature at 49-52degrees (Im wondering what could be the temperature if I returned the speed to normal with a lapped heatsink and a ne thermal paste).

[Battousai1]

BTW here ia an updated information. I just discovered that my other DDR RAM module is a PC333 (the 256MB DDR) and the other is PC266 (the 128MB DDR Apacer brand).

follow-up question regarding the RAM:

How would I know if the operation is at dual-channel (128-bit performance) already? The manula says that in order to attain dual-channel mode there should be atleast 2 or more dimm modules installed (combination of DIMMA and DIMMB), and if there is only one DIMM module installed the memory performs only at 64-bit. Is ther an applicaiton or a way to know if it is running at dual-channel (128bit)? BTW my memory modules are 1-PC333 356MB DDR RAM and 1- PC266 128MB DDR RAM installed on DIMM slot 1 and 3 respectively.