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Albatron K8SLI ATX motherboard Part One (Page 2 Installation & Appearence) 08/05/05
Installation:
The overall hardware installation went very smooth. Little was left to question and anything that might not be apparent was covered in detail in the documentation provided. Seeing we will not cover the SLI part of this product until the second 1/2 of the review what I wanted to mention were the layout and capabilities of this board. Different from many of their competitors Albatron places the CPU more towards the center and puts the memory slots horizontal and in the normal location that the CPU resides. The reason for this I believe has two parts. One it allows them to have a smaller footprint making this board easier to fit in all cases even most likely satellite cases. The second reason is to make room for the SLI solution without spreading the memory out to far. The method used was well done everything fits and appears to work properly. You will want to make sure the dimensions of your cooler however, because of this smaller blueprint I can see aftermarket coolers such as the Big Typhoon from Thermaltake or such coolers would be a very tight fit.. Another aspect I thought was interesting was the backup BIO's the unit allows for any problems caused by Overcooking or CMOS failures to be backed up and recovered. A big plus for folks like myself that might alter there components daily. The BIO's is located on an external chip that plugs into the motherboard. Manufactured by ABS this unit can be utilized for a multitude of functions please read the manual carefully for details of how to use. As for the component installation the memory goes in quick and easy just match the colors two purple and two green. One thing I found on the last two motherboards we looked at from Albatron was the color coated components this makes installation very very easy even for the novice PC enthusiast. Even the power and LED hookups use the color standards to make hook up a snap. You should also note this board uses the 4-pin 12v power along with the ATX 24-pin standard power cables so no worries about the correct pin outs unless you have the 20-pin setup.. I think that just about covers the hardware part of the install now onto the software. The BIO's Albatron chose to use in the K8SLI was the Phoenix Award brand very similar to many others. The overall implementation of the features is not new so changing any setting is as simple as most other products. Just hold the delete key down on reboot and real the menu carefully.
The second part of a software install are the OS drivers seeing we install Windows XP we used the nVidia nforce 4 drivers minus the SLI patch for now. IT was a pretty eventless install not much to report the nforce software has always installed pretty flawless ever sense the nforce2 chipset for the XP class CPU's.
The second part of a software install are the OS drivers seeing we install Windows XP we used the nVidia nforce 4 drivers minus the SLI patch for now. IT was a pretty eventless install not much to report the nforce software has always installed pretty flawless ever sense the nforce2 chipset for the XP class CPU's. Overall the installation minus SLI of course went very well the only problems I can foresee would be due to the small blueprint and some cooling devices other then the K8SLI installation procedure seems very sound and with their well written documentation the
Appearance: As I mentioned earlier the K8SLI motherboard is much smaller then many of its competitor making for an easy fit in virtually any type of case. The overall layout was well done and considering that Albatron uses color coding system to make installation a snap it is also visually appealing threw a window case.
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Marns CDA By pr101j |
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