Albatron K8SLI

BIOS:

Albatron had chosen to go with a BIOS based upon the Phoenix AwardBIOS template. The pages available in the BIOS were main, advanced, peripherals, power, hardware monitor, defaults, and exit. The BIOS is packed with the traditional options many motherboards offer, with a few notable modifications. Moving straight onto the DRAM configuration page, under the Advanced BIOS area, the memory frequency, Tcl, Tras, Trcd, Trp, and 1T/2T timings can be altered. Under the frequency/voltage control area, the CPU host frequency, HT ratio, PCI-E clock, CPU voltage, DDR voltage, and Chipset voltage can all be altered from its stock specifications. The CPU host frequency can be adjusted from 200MHz up to 450MHz (in 1MHz increments), while the CPU voltage has a 15% limit increase in three steps, the DDR voltage has support for up to 3.0V, with 0.1V increments after 2.7V, and finally the nForce4 SLI Chipset has support between 1.5V and 1.8V, with similar increments. The overclocking options are not the best we have seen but are quite respectable with the voltage and frequency modification possibilities. Under the hardware monitor area, the system and CPU temperature are monitored, as well as the CPU fan speed. Moving onto the listed voltages are the VCore, +3.3V, +5.00V, +12.00V, VBAT, and 5VSB. Although the Albatron K8SLI motherboard does follow the Phoenix AwardBIOS template relatively closely, the available overclocking options were appreciated although we would have been delighted to see more extensive voltage abilities. We would have also enjoyed seeing a few other improvements to the BIOS (such as monitoring the fan speed of the other fan connectors), but nonetheless it was well laid out.