Albatron KX 18D Pro II

Albatron KX 18D Pro II - nForce2 Ultra 400
Manufactured by: Albatron
Price: ~
Reviewed by:
Date : September 24th 2003

Introduction

The mainboard industry is definitely a game of MHz; the more you can squeeze out of a system the likely your chances of winning. The main competitors in the AMD arena are nVidia and VIA. nVidia's newest introduction, the nForce 2 Ultra 400 chipset could be considered at present the reining heavy weight champion for the AMD platform. Even though VIA tried to outsmart the nFoce2 Ultra 400 with the introduction of the KT600 chipset, it still really wasn't enough to out perform its might.

The nForce 2 Ultra 400 chipset is a result of a minor modification to the initial nForce2 design. Even though the initial nForce 2 chipset supported dual channel 400MHzDDR interface, its system BUS official supported only 333 MHz. This obviously resulted in bottlenecks in the system, since there was no proper synchronization. The best performance can be captured when both the memory interface and the system BUS operate at the same frequency level. With the introduction of the nFOrce2 Ultra 400, nVidia have resolved this problem and have provided official support to 400 MHz FSB.

Today we take a look at Albatron's newest introduction o the AMD platform, the KX 18D Pro II, which s based on the nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset. If you're a performance enthusiast I'm sure Albatron needs no special introduction. Even though they haven't been in this part of the industry for long, Albatron have gained a very strong reputation for producing high quality performance hardware components. If you missed out on previous articles of their products reviewed here at Technoyard, follow these links

Albatron GeForce FX5600P Turbo

Albatron GeForce 4 Ti4200P Turbo

Lets take a closer look at the features and specification of this board, before going into the details.

Features

AMD Athlon™ / Athlon™XP / Athlon™XP Barton/ Duron™Processor
Socket 462 with FSB 200/266/333/400+(by overclocking)MHz
3 DDR400/DDR333/266/200 Memory Sockets
AGP 8X , 6 channel AC 97 Audio
2 ATA133 Channels, up to 4 ATA 133 IDE Devices
nForce2 MCP-T 10/100 Ethernet LAN
2 Serial ATA150 Channels, Serial ATA RAID 0,1 (Software)
2 IEEE1394a Ports
6 USB 2.0/1.1 Ports (4 ports by optional cable)
BIOS Mirror ™
Voice Genie™
Chipset with Hyper-Transport Technology
Bundle SPDIF Card ( optional )

Processor

AMD Athlon™/Athlon™XP/ Athlon™XP Barton/ Duron™Processor

FSB

200/266/333/400+(by overclocking)MHz

Chipset

North Bridge: NVIDIA nForce2 SPP (Ultra 400)
South Bridge: NVIDIA nForce2 MCP-T
LAN Chip : LAN PHY ICS1893AF
IEEE1394 Chip : TI IEEE1394A TSB41AB2PAP PAP-64
Audio Codec: Realtek ALC650
Serial ATA Chip :Silicon Image Sil3112A
I / O Chip : Winbond W83627HF

Memory

3 *DDR Sockets:
DDR400/DDR333/266/DDR200 NON-ECC DDR SDRAM up to 3GB ( Single Channel) , up to 2GB ( Dual Channel )

Expansion Slots

1 x AGP 3.0 8X/4X slot (1.5V & 0.8 V Only)
6 x PCI slots (PCI 2.2 compliant)

IDE Connectors

2 ATA133 channels, up to 4 ATA 133 IDE Devices

Onboard I/O Connectors

1 x Floppy Connector
2 x USB 2.0/1.1 header (4 ports USB cable optional)
2 x IEEE1394 header (2 ports IEEE1394 cable optional)
1 x CD_IN header
1 x COM Port header
1 x S/PDIF in/out header (S/PDIF in/out cable optional)
1 x CPU fan header with fan rotation detection function
1 x System fan headers with fan rotation detection function
1 x10 pin system panel header (Intel spec)
1 x 3 pin Power LED header
1 x 4 pin Speaker header
1 x Front audio header (Intel spec)
1 x Case Open detection header
1 x Wake on LAN

I/O via Back Panel

PS/2 keyboard/mouse, 2 x USB(2.0/1.1), RJ45 ,1 x Com(serial), 1 x Parallel, 1x Game/Line-in/Line-out/MIC

Power

20-pin ATX power connector

BIOS Feature

4 Mb Flash EEPROM
Award BIOS with ACPI, DMI2.0, PnP, WfM2.0, Green Suspend to RAM (S3), Suspend to Disk (S4) Wake on keyboard / Mouse, Wake on LAN/RTC Timer

Hardware Monitoring

2 FAN sensors, CPU/System voltages and temperature monitoring

Special Feature

Zero Jumper Design
BIOS Mirror™ Protect BIOS by creating an original mirror image of itself
Voice Genie ™ Voice Troubleshooting system ( four-Language )
Adjustable CPU and AGP frequency by 1 MHz increment, Adjustable V_core, V_AGP, V_Memory for overclocking.
Special design for CPU Over Temperature Protection.( OTP )

Certifications

FCC,CE, BSMI

Form Factor

ATX (244*305 mm)

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