Even though socket 754 is still in the birthing stages, there are quite some options for what motherboard to get to accompany it. Albatron's K8X800 Pro II implements this north bridge and south bridge combination, as well as some other IC 's from VIA in this loaded motherboard.

Albatron at this point no longer wants much of an introduction. While not at the point being one of the ‘‘Tiers I" OEM manufacturers for video cards or motherboards, they are solidly in the "Tier II'' area. As a spin-off of Gigabyte, they have a few of the same features, and go after the same enthusiast market. They have made some of the best over-clocking GeForce 4 Ti cards, but do these socket 754 board stacks up to the example set before it?

As I mentioned before, the chipset used to power this board is the VIA K8T800 Northbridge (NB) and VT8237 Southbridge (SB). This is a standard arrangement, even though there is very small going on in that NB. In a traditional setup, the NB is comprised of mostly a memory controller and an AGP controller. Here architecture however, that memory functionality has been moved on board the Athlon 64 processor. Typically, this has been a weak point for VIA, but thanks to AMD, it is no longer much of a concern for them; with the memory controller moved, the Northbridge no longer has a lot to perform.

The hidden truth is that while the DB is connected to the processor at high speeds, interconnect to the SB is quite slow by comparison. The nForce3 150 does not even have a bus to the south bridge as it is a single chip, while the SiS solution uses a large 1GB/s bus between the two, and the ALi one has another Hyper Transport link. This has to be considered something for VIA to upgrade in a future revision, especially considering all of the high traffic devices now populating this board. Most likely this won't be an issue soon, with the implementation of PCI Express in the coming months, as that bus design has bandwidth to spare and could be used like the PCI bus of old to connect the NB and SB as well as piggy backing your peripheral devices.

The hidden truth is that while the DB is connected to the processor at high speeds, interconnect to the SB is quite slow by comparison. The nForce3 150 does not even have a bus to the south bridge as it is a single chip, while the SiS solution uses a large 1GB/s bus between the two, and the ALi one has another Hyper Transport link. This has to be considered something for VIA to upgrade in a future revision, especially considering all of the high traffic devices now populating this board. Most likely this will not be a problem soon, with the implementation of PCI Express in the coming months, as that bus design has bandwidth to spare and could be used like the PCI bus of old to connect the NB and SB as well as piggy backing your peripheral devices.

Albatron K8X800 Pro II Review - K8X800 Pro II Specifications

• CPU: AMD K8
• Chipset: VIA K8T800/8237
• Socket: 754
• Form Factor: ATX ( 305*244 mm )
• FSB: 800 MHz
• Memory: 3*DDR200/266/333/400
• AGP: 8X
• PCI: 6
• USB: 8 USB 2.0/1.1 Ports (6 ports by optional cable)
• LAN: 3Com 1Gbits LAN
• Sound: 8 channel Audio
• South Bridge Speed : ATA100
• RAID: Serial ATA RAID 0,1
• Serial ATA: 2 Serial ATA150 Channels
• IEEE 1394: 2 *IEEE1394 Ports
• BIOS Mirror: Y
• Voice Genies: Y

As you can see, this board is not lacking in features. The 8237 south bridge is loaded similarly to the Intel ICH5R, with 8 USB 2.0 ports, 2 SATA ports - capable of RAID 0 or 1 - and the standard features, such as PCI bus mastering, two ATA 100 channels to support 4 devices, sound and LAN. These last two have however been replaced by IC's on the board. Albatron has used a 3com Gigabit controller instead of the 10/100 one in the SB. Unfortunately, this chip seems let down by its drivers; it was visibly slower compared to the Intel Pro 100+ card that I normally use, even while surfing the web. I am fairly certain that a software update is all that is necessary, since there is no reason for it to act this way.

The other chip which replaces an equivalent one in the south bridge is still from the VIA catalog. It is the same Envy 24 bit audio processor found in sound cards like the M-Audio Revolution and Terratec Digifire. However, it is defined as the PT version, where those on a discreet card are labeled as HT. I am not confident from the documentation what the physical differences are, if any. Again however, this quality hardware (the sound in various media is exceptional) seems let down by it is drivers. It is supposedly capable of 24 bit 192 KHz processing, but I was never able to select such options when encoding audio from DVD's. With some better configured software, this would be - from a technical standpoint - a dynamite onboard solution to rival that of the "Soundstorm" found on some nForce2 motherboards.

Also from the VIA stable is an IEEE 1394 (FireWire) controller. This type of connectivity is favored by those with Digital Video cameras, external hard drives, and Apple iPods. It is pretty much a standard feature on all high end motherboards now.