The Board

As mentioned in the specifications, the KM18G Pro has a 4x/8x AGP slot and three 32 bit PCI slots. I really liked the AGP card retention mechanism used on this motherboard. Albatron's designers realized that a lots of people interested in the KM18G Pro would be putting it in a LAN machine, so they went ahead and beefed up the clip to make sure that the sweet $500 video card installed does not come loose in transit and smash itself all over the inside of the case.

Next is the Northbridge and south bridge of the nForce2 chipset. They put a pretty nice looking chipset cooler on there, for aesthetics more than anything else.

The pictures below show the 3 DIMM slots and the IDE connectors. Everything is on the board as it should be; there are not any obstructions, and the positioning makes cable routing easier. To use dual channel, two of the similar type of memory needs to be used: one stick of memory in either DIMM 1 or DIMM 2, and the second stick of memory installed in DIMM 3.

The CPU socket has plenty of room around it, making it perfect for whatever type of heat-sink is preferred. Unfortunately, however, it does not have the 4 mounting holes around it for large heat-sinks, like what Alpha and Swiftech manufacture. I would prefer to use a large heat-sink like the Swiftech MCX462+ with a quiet fan, but that is not an option with the KM18G Pro.

The back plate connectors are shown below. Shown are the PS/2, USB, LAN, parallel port, COM port, VGA plug, game port, and sound connections. Luckily, even though Albatron select not to include a backplane cover, all the connections are in their mostly standard locations, so using an old back plate cover that might be lying around is not out of the question if your case does not already have a similarly configured back plate.

This next picture really shows the advantage of using a micro-ATX motherboard. The motherboard below it is a full sized ATX motherboard (shown for comparison).