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Albatron K8SLI


Date
: 06/6/05 – 03:01:35 PM

Author
:

Category
: Motherboard

Page 1 : Index

Manufacturer
: Albatron

Price
: $160 USD

Albatron is not an uncommon name in the industry or at Overclockers Online. We have reviewed a few of their motherboards and video cards and they have produced a fine number of innovative products.

Today, we've been given the opportunity to review the Albatron K8SLI. As far as I know, this is the first AMD SLI motherboard Albatron has produced, and it appears to be in high demand because of its lower cost compared to competitors. Performance at a low cost is one important key to a successful product.

In today's review, we'll be pairing up the K8SLI with a brand spanking new Athlon 64 Venice Core and a high quality cooler in order to see what the K8SLI can do with some real manpower.

Page 2 : Package

The K8SLI arrived from Taiwan about a week after I had requested; after paying my brokerage fees I took home the package and it felt like Christmas. Slicing open the shipping box, I had in front of me what the USA military forces wouldn't want you to actually have… my own personal double barreled tank.

So it's not exactly a real tank, but you get the idea. The K8SLI utilizes two VGA cards for twice the performance, or with military tanks…two barrels would often be better than one in a war.

The bottom right corner of the box lists a few of the key features what the K8SLI has.

All the features listed sound pretty good and in a few pages we'll go over them in detail.

The back of the box shows two pictures of the motherboard: a layout shot and one with 2 video cards linked in SLI with the ABS system.

A close up…

To the left side of the back, a few of the features are listed. The three year manufacturer's warranty will surely be a sigh of relief for those who often require RMAs for repairs.

All in all, a decent layout of the box showing exactly what the customer will get.

When we open up the box, the first layer isn't the motherboard. Instead, we're presented with a number of documents and the driver CD.
The magazine printed DIY installation guide gives you a quick run down of how to start from no system to a setup where you're ready to install the operating system. The sticker is a great reference guide to smack to the inside of your side panel. The most important piece of reference is the manual. Although it looks thick, the actual content is only 53 pages. The manual is packaged in several different languages. The nForce driver CD will be required upon a clean Windows installation, nothing out of the ordinary in terms of what Albatron packages with its systems.

The other bag of goodies we're presented with upon opening the package are the various connectors and accessories for the K8SLI.

Included in this bunch is a FDD cable, two ATA cables, an SATA cable, SATA power adapter and an I/O shield. It would be nice if Albatron provided extra SATA cables and IDE to SATA converters. But to keep the costs low, they opted not to include them.

There are two more things that you'll find inside the box before getting to the motherboard. Albatron prides itself on both of them; one is the SLI bridge, or golden finger. Without an SLI bridge, your two 6800GT's won't be all that useful from a performance standpoint. The second device is the ABS, or Albatron Bios Security card. The ABS card is essentially a second BIOS chip for the K8SLI. In the event the original BIOS is corrupted, say due to a flash, you can change the jumpers on the ABS card and recover your system.

Now that we have covered all the accessories in the box, we're going to jump to the specifications before taking a look at the motherboard.

Page 3 : Specifications

Albatron has conveniently provided all of its specifications on the website. We'll quote it for you.

Page 4 : Layout

The layout of the S939 systems is slightly different than some of my previous AMD machines; my last one being an Abit NF7-S rig.

The first thing I noticed was that this motherboard seemed smaller…if you carefully read the specifications it reads 293*198. This is roughly 4 cm narrower than most SLI motherboards! The advantage is that you'll be able to squeeze this board into even the smallest mid tower cases.

With the K8SLI, the socket is located just above the motherboard and the DIMMs are above the socket and run parallel to the expansion slots.

The 24-pin power connector runs along the side of the motherboard as some people prefer it to. Others may wish that the power connector and the FDC connector switched locations. It's all a matter of preference and how well you can reorganize all your cables to maximize air flow.

The Albatron K8SLI uses a heatsink fan combination to cool the nForce 4 SLI chipset.

As we'll see later, this may not be one of the best locations to place the chipset. It's flanked in between the PCI-Express x16 slot and the CPU. The area is somewhat of a busy zone with the industry moving towards large heatsinks for both the VGA cards and CPUs. When I mounted my NT02 and my Bravo X700 with the 60mm fan installed, both fans towered over the 40mm chipset HSF, minimizing the airflow to the nForce 4 chip. In addition, if you decide to use a custom chipset cooler, you will be restricted in size too due to the tight quarters.

With the two PCI-Express cards, there isn't much room for many PCI slots…as a matter of fact you only get two. However, with all the built-in features the K8SLI board has and the move towards PCI-E X1, there isn't much need for many more legacy PCI slots.

Albatron is the first to introduce a switchless SLI interface. What this means is the Albatron motherboard will automatically detect whether or not you have SLI compatible video cards. If you do, whola, shared PCI-E x16 bus. It's that simple with this board. No finicking around with jumpers.

It's features like the Realtek AC'97 6 Channel audio controller (ALC655) and the Vitesse CIS8201 Gigabyte network controller that have eliminated the need for so many PCI slots. However, the lack of dual RJ-45 jacks is a shame; I found that to be quite useful. With the dropping price of routers, they are becoming obsolete to the average user.

Located slightly left from the center of the board is the 4-pin auxiliary power connector.

I personally think this is a terrible location. The power connector is going to cross directly over the socket and disturb the air circulation. It's only a minor detail as anyone can do some fancy wire work to prevent cables from crossing above the HSF.

At the bottom right corner is a mass of connectors.

In this zone are the jumpers for the switches and LEDs on your chassis, the ABS slot, the CMOS jumper, four SATA connectors and two USB headers. Let's not forget the Phoneix BIOS.

Flipping the board over is the back plate to support the HSF. It's held on by the two screws from the plastic frame surrounding the CPU that supports the HSF.

Our last image before moving on is a shot of the I/O features.

Not exactly a bad variety of things. Let's move onto the features….

Page 5 : Features

As we already know, this Socket 939 motherboard is based of the nForce 4 SLI chipset.

If you're looking to find the features of the nForce 4 SLI for AMD, look no further.

All of the above features are standard in any nForce 4 SLI motherboard, not just Albatron. A detailed run down of all the features can be found at nVidia's nForce 4 SLI page.

Page 6 : Installation

If you've installed one motherboard, then you won't be challenged in installing another. Once you have all the parts, it's only a matter of time before getting it into your case. You should always take your time and be extra careful.

I started my installation of the K8SLI by putting it into my Ahanix D.Vine 4. My initial concern was whether or not I'd have enough space to lay down some of the larger coolers in this case.

As you can see, the black support beam running across the top of the case may get in the way of the cooler I plan on installing. We're going to skip the stock cooler and jump into the big boy toys for overclocking.

With the motherboard in place, next step is to take the CPU and line up the corners so the CPU simply falls into the open socket.

I hope to get some serious overclocking done with the K8SLI. I've seen the Venice core do 2.8 on some other websites! Given Albatron's recent improvements with overclocking, there's no pressure on the K8SLI today! :)

Once the CPU is in place, it's time to apply a thin layer of thermal paste and secure the HSF according the manual. For our review, we'll be using the SilverStone NT02. It's quite tight with the Ahanix D.Vine 4, but it fits! :)

Slowly but surely all the components will end up in the case and in the right place. As always, refer to the manual for help. It's your guide to a working machine.

For our installation, my 40GB Maxtor ATA hard drive will be on IDE channel 0 and my BenQ DVD burner will be on IDE Channel 1. No floppy drive will be installed.

In our last Albatron review, PX 915 G4 Pro, Albatron had not yet completed its own system monitor software, however after 5 months of work it has been completed. They've released, at the time of writing this, version 1.0 of Dr. Speed. This piece of software monitors your system vitals and lets you do some very basic overclocking.

For your reference, here are the full system specs for this review:

With the system all configured, let's jump to the BIOS and do some overclocking!

Page 7 : BIOS and Overclocking

Albatron uses a fairly standard Phoniex Award BIOS and it only has minor variations over the other two Albatron motherboards we've looked at.

The most important section to any enthusiast are the pages that allow you to overclock. This includes the DRAM…

and CPU/Frequency section.

A few of you may also consider altering the PnP/PCI page as well as the Peripherals and Power area.

As always, one page is dedicated to hardware monitoring…

and the last is saving.

With the BIOS section completed, we can focus in on the overclocking aspect of this motherboard. Overclocking is a fine art that is not easy to master. With the aid of a good motherboard and all the right settings, overclocking allows you to achieve the absolute most out of your system.

The K8SLI allows you to adjust the bus frequency from 200 MHz up to 450 MHz with 1 MHz increments. What some people may find frustrating is the CPU voltage; where many of us prefer the 0.025 V increments, Albatron uses a percentage increment over the default setting…increments of 5, 10, and 15% over the default. Although this allows you to change the value up to ~1.6Vs (for the Venice cores), there's not much variation in between, not always the best option for overclocking. The DDR and Chipset voltage have not changed; they remain in increments of 0.1V. You will also able to change the HyperTransport setting from 1X to 5x or use the auto option.

The DRAM configuration has the option between manual and auto; you can already guess what auto does. With manual, you can configure the times yourself and lock the memory dividers at different frequencies: 100, 133, 166, 200, 216, 233, and 250 MHz.

After finicking around and ensuring a stable overclock, I ended up at 244*9 for HT of 5X and memory clocked at 244 3-4-4-8. This isn't the best overclock yet, but we're not done! If we change the HyperTransport multiplier to 4X, and lock the memory divider to 133 3-4-4-8 (ensuring our RAM isn't the bottle neck), we can easily achieve
300*9
with 100% stability. High frequency memory modules would've been a nice touch as the lowered RAM frequency will have an impact on our performance. Regardless, this is a very good overclock that rivals some of the other brand name boards.

Just to let you know, the K8SLI had no problems booting to Windows at 315*9 with the Venice Core, but this wasn't 100% stable. The odd benchmark would crash which is not acceptable by our standards. A stable overclock is one that can run all of our benchmarks and run Prime95 for 24 hrs without any issues.

Now that we've gotten the Venice core settled in we'll run some benches and get some numbers for performance comparison.

Page 8 : Benchmarks

Our benchmarking suite consists of eleven titles ranging from synthetic software to popular games. We'll be using three FutureMark titles: 3DMark 2003, 3DMark 2005 and PC Mark 2004. These pieces of software will give us a relative gauge of system performance. PCMark 2004 provides tests in such situations as encoding, compression, decompression, virus scanning, and content creation which provides a number for comparing system-wide performance levels. We'll also throw in the classic Quake 3 which places an emphasis on the CPU, memory and chipset performance, not on the GPU. ScienceMark 2 and Super Pi provide us with stressful mathematical applications to compare CPU, system, and memory performance between systems. SiSoft Sandra 2005 is a commonly used benchmark for testing memory bandwidth and CPU performance. In conjunction to the SiSoft Sandra 2005 memory benchmarks, we'll be using Everest, successor of the AIDA32, to test the memory performance since we've used two different memory dividers throughout our benchmarks.

In addition to the software listed above, we'll include benchmark runs of Halo, Far Cry and Half-Life 2. These three titles should give us a relative gauge on the systems performance for other titles in the same category.

Tests will be performed on our AMD A64 Venice machine and, for reference, a stock Pentium 4 desktop. Here are the specifications again:

Future Mark 3D Mark 2003

Future Mark 3D Mark 2005

FutureMark PC Mark 2004

Science Mark v2.0

Super Pi 2 Million Digits 20 Iterations

SiSoft Sandra 2005 CPU Arithmetic

SiSoft Sandra 2005 CPU Multimedia

SiSoft Sandra 2005 Memory

Everest Memery Benchmark

Quake 3 Arena

Halo

Far Cry

Half-Life 2

The numbers tell a rather interesting story. When it comes to stock settings, the 3Ghz Pentium 4 edges ahead of the stock Venice 3000+ for our synthetic benchmarks. Our real world performance, Quake 3 Arena, Halo, Far Cry and Half-Life 2, easily excel above the Pentium 4 3.0E. As soon as we start overclocking, our A64 machine doesn't even have to come close to 3.0GHz before beating out the 3.0E in every aspect of performance. The only challenge is in PC Mark 2004 where our Prescott can take advantage of the 1MB Cache as opposed to the 512KB for the Venice. Note that we're still running on Microsoft XP Pro 32-Bit and 64 Bit experience has not yet been fully utilized!

We can immediately see that by switching the memory divider to 133 we effectively set the memory to operate at 400 MHz, and the end result is a drop in memory performance.

To test out the audio I played a couple DVDs off my machine, fragged a few people in CS and blasted a few tunes during the summer nights. Onboard audio has come a long way, it'll be more than sufficient for casual users. A true audiophile may wish to go ahead and pick up a more professional class sound card; perhaps the upcoming Creative Xtreme Fidelity which boasts many tasty features.

On to the next page where we'll wrap things up.

Page 9 : Conclusion

Albatron has worked hard to deliver a motherboard capable of performing the tasks that all enthusiasts want while maintaining a reasonable price tag that many can afford.

It is highly overclockable and will be a very nice companion to the recently released AMD A64 Venice cores, which are spreading like wildfire because they're so popular. At the same time, there's still a tiny bit of room for improvement. A clock setting of 300*9 is impressive, but 315*9 fully stable would've been jaw dropping.

The K8SLI is bundled with some very nice features, but some additional accessories would be nice. The ABS was a real nice touch, in case you're one of those people who happen to corrupt their BIOS occasionally. The jumperless SLI switching will be very handy for those using the full capabilities of the motherboard. The space saving, smaller layout has both advantages and disadvantages that won't be much concern to many end users.

Overall, this is the type of motherboard you'll want to invest in when it comes to building a compact LAN machine that can throw one hell of a punch. Given the performance and price of this motherboard, the Albatron K8SLI has earned itself the
Overclockers Online Budget Award

Advantages

Compact PCB to fit in most cases
Low cost for SLI capable performance
ABS and digital SLI switching is a nice touch

Disadvantages

I felt more could have be gained from the CPU during overclocking, perhaps future BIOS updates will provide more stability in the system
More goodies in the packaging would of been a real nice touch

Overclockers Online would like to thank Albatron for providing us with this sample.