Albatron K8X800 Pro II Review - K8X800 Pro II Board Layout

[vasica143]

Top left side of the board having six audio ports, two of the USB 2.0 ports and the Ethernet/parallel/serial/PS2 connections present on any existing motherboard except for the "MAX" line from ABIT. Personally, I would like to see more manufactures follow that example, as I can not think of any current devices that use these legacy connections. I would much rather see at least two more USB ports on the backplane, so that I am less likely to need to use the integrated PCI bracket to be able to hook up all of my devices (keyboard, mouse, printer, PDA, camera, scanner, flash memory).

Right at the back all of that are the 3 phase power regulation circuitry and the 12V power connector. Including that connector there is not the best for cable routing. Assume that the VRM uses the 12V line to transform down to the 1.5V necessary by the A64, it is best to have it close as probable to the socket like it is. This helps carry on the losses and variation down, which increase with distance. Still along the top of the board, at the center line is the CPU socket. As you can observe, AMD has implemented a heat-sink preservation frame similar to the one used by Intel on all P4 boards. This is a step in the right direction, after the continued reliance on socket lugs in the SocketA platform. It leaves enough room in the area for large heat-sinks and water-blocks.

I have problem with the position of the DIMM slots. They really cannot be put any higher up on the board, but by being so far from the side, even a small graphics card like the Radeon 8500 I use will prevent you from installing RAM with it in there. As a tradeoff however, the ATX and ATA connectors are placed nicely on the edge of the board, allowing those cables to be routed simply out of the main case airflow.

Coming back to the dead middle of the board, you will find the Northbridge and AGP slot. There is a very small inactive cooler on the Northbridge, which seems proper given the restricted number of functions it does. It does get very hot though. I am surprising how that will affect over-clocking. There is a fan header right there though if you select to add an aftermarket active cooler.

The AGP slot has a very good lock on it, useful for part of mind if you port your case around a lot, and have a weighty video card. In this similar area is the 3com IC for the LAN. Under the AGP you will find a full complement of 6 PCI slots. Not that most people will want this a lot of, considering the number of devices on board. I would gladly trade one of them to move around the memory slots a bit.

Next to the bottom of the board you will get one of my favorite layout features: a straight line of case hookups, as well as the pins for the additional USB and FireWire ports. This makes getting the board up and running easy, especially with the integrated documentation.

Finally, under the 6 PCI slot is where you will get the floppy connector stuck in. It is just about the bad location for this. Fortunately, floppies are going the way of the dinosaur. It is getting to the point where I do not care that I can not install my drive with a standard length cable, because I only use it when putting on a fresh copy of Windows and it wants my RAID drivers.

[vasica143]

Apparently, these BOOT are the typical Phoenix BIOS seen in lots of Albatron, ASUS, and Gigabyte boards. It does, however, harbor a few interesting differences. The first is image in the screen to the above-right. Usually, you do not see Northbridge voltages, even though they show up a few times; nForce2 boards in particular are noted for this. The surprising ones are the Southbridge and LDT voltages. I am not confident why you would require Southbridge voltage modulation, but it is nice to have, since it might at times helping steady the components of the SB when the PCI bus is way off in frequency. Same for the LDT voltage, which controls the HT bus voltage. As you can observe by the grayed-out PCI/AGP numbers, you can not lock them,

or change dividers. There is enough voltage, although, for CPU and DDR to make all but the hardcore happy. That said, considering that you cannot modify the PCI/AGP bus speeds, you maybe do not want access to chip killing voltages anyway.

The hardware monitor shows all the required voltages. A BIOS update helped to cure a few of the incorrectness of the thermal probe, but 52C in BIOS for a water-cooled A64 seems awfully high. I am going to say that the system temp in my frigid room is at least 15 degrees off. I only wish I could afford the heating bill required to move from an outside temperature of -25C to 34C in my room.

Not too much for latency control of the ram. Maybe not a bad idea either, as I had great difficulty getting it to agree to work with timings set in the BIOS, as opposed to letting it read from the SPD. A BIOS fix from Albatron should correct that soon.