Albatron K8SLI

When it comes to Albatron, they offer a creative assortment of products ranging from their AGP6200AL, which allows the user to run an AGP 8x graphics card on their PCI Express motherboard, to Widio, which is a digital wireless audio system. However, in the PC motherboard market Albatron does make their presence known with a wide array of both AMD and Intel solutions. The question then comes up, does their creative engineering also extend to their motherboard offerings? With the motherboard we have our hands on today from Albatron, it features such innovations as a Zero Jumper Design, Dual BIOS, and Watch Dog Timer. Powering the inner-workings of the motherboard is NVIDIA's nForce4 SLI Chipset, which supports Scalable Link Interface in x8 + x8 mode. Of course, with this being our first Albatron review it will be interesting to see how their products fare in the world of Linux. Thus, without further ado we present the Socket 939 based Albatron K8SLI.

Features:

Processor
· Socket 939 with AMD Athlon 64 / Athlon 64 FX /Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processors

Chipset
· Chip: nForec4 SLI
· LAN Chip: VITESSE VSC8201RX (PHY)
· Audio Chip: Realtek ALC655
· I/O Chip: Winbond Smart I/O W83627THF

Memory
· 4 x DDR 333/400 NON-ECC DDR SDRAM up to 4GB (Dual Channel)

Expansion Slots
· 2 x PCI Express x 16 (x8 SLI)
· 2 x PCI Express x 1
· 2 x PCI slots (PCI 2.3 compliant)

IDE / SATA Connectors
· 2 ATA133 Channels, up to 4 IDE devices
· 4 SATAII 3Gb/s Channels, up to 4 SATAII devices,and supports SATA RAID 0, 1, 5, & 0+1

Power
· 24-pin ATX power connector, 4-pin ATX 12V power connector

Hardware Monitoring
· 3 FAN sensors, CPU/System voltages and temperature monitoring

Special Features
· Zero Jumper Design
· Dual BIOS (Second BIOS by ABS Card)
· Zero Jumper Design
· Adjustable CPU frequency by 1 MHz increment, Adjustable Vcore, & VMemory for overclocking.
· Watch Dog Timer
· Special design for CPU Over Temperature Protection.(OTP)

Form Factor
· ATX (293 x 198 mm)

Contents:

The Albatron K8SLI ships in retail motherboard packaging that comes decorated in a forest green camouflage and on the top is a tank with dual barrels. Also prominently displayed on the various sides is the NVIDIA SLI Chipset as well as its official NVIDIA certification for Scalable Link Interface. As we had shared in our initial Linux SLI preview, only motherboards that pass NVIDIA's official multi-GPU criteria are allowed to display the "SLI Ready" badges. Opening the packaging, separating the accessories from the actual motherboard was a cardboard partition to prevent damage during shipping. Included with the Albatron K8SLI in addition to the motherboard itself were two ribbon IDE cables, one ribbon FDD cable, one SATA power adapter, one SATA data cable, one dual BIOS card, SLI bridge, I/O shield, DIY installation guide, user's manual, and setup/driver CD. The K8SLI user manual is quite in-depth as the English section is 53 pages long and covers everything from hardware installation to BIOS configuration and finally SLI setup inside of Microsoft Windows.