Albatron KM18G Pro Motherboard Review

I recently reviewed an Abit NF7-S Rev 2.0 and was really impressed with it. This motherboard is also a nForce 2 based motherboard however this one also has onboard video. This board is a small form factor motherboard which makes it perfect for a small system such as a LAN box. Just because this is a small motherboard doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have a lot of features. In addition the onboard video there is also sound, NIC, TV-out, and USB 2.0. I am really interested to see how well this motherboard does compared to the NF7-S and how the onboard video does. The specifications below are taken from the Albatron website.

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 10/100 Ethernet LAN
6 USB 2.0/1.1 Ports (4 ports by optional cable)
Chipset with Hyper-Transport Technology

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
LAN Chip : LAN PHY ICS1893AF
Audio Codec: Realtek ALC650
I / O Chip : Winbond W83627H

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)
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
Adjustable CPU and AGP frequency by 1 MHz increment, Adjustable Vcore, VAGP, VMemory for overclocking.
Special design for CPU Over Temperature Protection(OTP)

Form Factor
ATX (244*305 mm)

This Albatron KM18G Pro motherboard has quite a shiney box, you can see some of my reflection in it. The top of the box lets you know that there is a TV-out header included along with some other information. The back of the box has some more detailed specifications and a picture of the board.

The board has a brilliant blue PCB and is quite small due to the fact that it is a MicroATX form factor. The board looks to have a fairly good layout for being so small and having so many features included. I also like how the DDR slots are color coded to signify the dual channel memory slots. There isn’t much to say about the bottom of the board except that it is quite blue.

The I/O panel has just about everything you need to get a system up and running. There are the standard PS/2, serial, and parallel ports but you more than standard with this board. There are also 3 RCA mini jacks (Front Speakers, Line-in, and Mic-in) there are also 2 USB 2.0 ports and a RJ-45 LAN Connector so you don’t have to waste a PCI slot. This board also has onboard video which is powered by the Nvidia nForce 2 IGP northbridge.

Albatron includes a really nice feature with this motherboard, a TV-out header. This can be hooked to your a set of jumpers on your motherboard so you can hook your computer to your TV if you desire. The header gives you the option of using either S-Video out or RCA out. You also get two extra USB 2.0 ports on a header, an IDE cable, and a floppy cable. The manual is easy to read and navigate through and comes in a few different languages. The CD contains drivers, PC-CILLIN2002, Adobe Reader 5.1, and DirectX 8.1b. There is no real software bundle and the drivers and software provided are quite old.

The nForce 2IGP northbridge is covered by an active heatsink fan which should do a sufficient job to cool it down. The IGP northbridge has an intergraded Geforce 4 MX440 which makes this a great motherboard for a LAN system or a low cost system. I took the heatsink off and found a thermal pad which is not the best thing but it should do alright for this application. With the heatsink removed and no thermal compound on the core we can see the northbridge in all its splendor.

The southbridge on this motherboard is the Nvidia nForce 2 MCP which is different than the one used on the Abit NF7-S Rev 2.0 which is a MCP-T. They both have USB 2.0, ATA133, and a Nvidia Ethernet MAC address. The MCP-T is the same as the MCP except it also has firewire support, Nvidia’s Audio Processing Unit and a second Ethernet MAC address.

 

This motherboard has 1 8x AGP slot and 3 PCI slots, this should be enough for any application. I really like that an 8x AGP slot was included so that if you don’t want to use the onboard video you can add a faster card. Also to the right of the picture you can see the I/O Winbond W83627HF-AW chip. Right above the northbridge is the ATX power connector which is positioned well so that it is easily accessible and not in the way of anything.

The DDR slots are at the top right of the motherboard along with the IDE and floppy drive connectors. The slots are color coded so that when you go to install your RAM you don’t forget to put the RAM in the correct slots to enable the dual channel capability. If you don’t know what dual channel means, basically there are two independent 64-bit DDR memory controllers which means you will be getting 128-bits of bandwidth. To have your motherboard running in dual channel mode you will need two matched sticks of memory. If you are using this motherboard in dual channel mode and utilizing the onboard video you will get better results from it because of the extra bandwidth. The socket has a fair amount of room around it, however to the bottom left of the socket are some capacitors which could get in the way of a large heatsink.

The BIOS used on this motherboard is a Phoenix AwardBIOS but looks a little different that the other Phoenix BIOS layouts. I am not really sure to be honest why they have two different styles however I’m sure there is not a significant difference. In the main section of the BIOS you can set the time/date, boot devices, and get a little bit of other information.

 

The main section of the advanced tab is where you set the boot order of your computer. There are also three sub categories which are: advanced BIOS features, advanced chipset features, and PnP/PCI configurations. Inside of the advanced BIOS features sub category there are a good amount of different features which can be enabled or disabled. Normally these settings are in the main section of the advanced tab. Within the PnP/PCI configurations section you can choose the settings you want for data configuration resetting, what resources are controlled by, PCI/VGA palette snoop, and PCI latency timer.

 

The Advanced Chipset Features section is where you can change your CPU, RAM, and AGP settings. There is a good amount of RAM settings to choose from such as RAS, RCD, RP, and CAS latency. There are also a good amount of AGP settings to choose from such as the spread spectrum, aperture size, frequency, 8x support, and fast writes. You are unable to change the multiplier on this motherboard so that is clearly going to hinder overclocking. The FSB is able to be changed and goes up to 200MHz however I doubt that I will even get close to that. You are also able to change the DDR:CPU ratio which will let you set the DDR speed higher than the CPU basically.

In the peripherals section you can set the first display device and onboard devices. Because this motherboard has so much onboard functionality it is nice that things are able to be enabled or disabled. I left everything enabled because I wanted to fully test the motherboard. The power management setup section is where you can set your ACPI, wakeups, and power on functions options.

 

The HW monitor section is pretty basic and simple, in here you are able to monitor temperatures, voltages, and fan RPMs.

 

I will be using the following benchmarks: SiSoft Sandra 2004, PCMark04, 3DMark2001SE, 3DMark03, Quake 3, Serious Sam 2, and Unreal Tournament 2003. I will be using an Abit NF7-S Rev 2.0 to compare against the motherboard and a Power-Color Radeon 9200SE to compare against the onboard GeForce 4 MX400 video. My system is running Windows XP with SP1 with DirectX 9b and is freshly formatted. I used Nvidia’s 3.13 unified drivers for the motherboards and onboard video and ATi’s Catalyst 3.10 for the Radeon. Below are the rest of the hardware specifications for the benchmarking. Sisoft Sandra testing was done at 166FSB while the synthetic and game benchmarks were done at 133FSB.

I wanted to use the Power-Color Radeon 9200SE rather than a higher end video card because the onboard video is not a high end solution. If I were to put in a really good video card the comparison really wouldn’t matter. I wanted to see how two low end budget effective solutions would do against each other to give a better comparison. I also tested the 9200SE on the Abit NF7-S to compare the two motherboards effectively.

Test Bed

• Albatron KM18G Pro
• Abit NF7-S Rev 2.0
• 1800+ Thoroughbred
• 60GB Seagate Barracuda IV HDD
• 1024MB PC3200 Corsair TwinX
• Onboard GeForce 4 MX440
• Power-Color Radeon 9200SE
• Koolcase’s Panther
• Plextor 40x12x40 CDRW
• SilenX 400w PSU (review to come)
• AOpen AC7L2 heatsink (review to come)

SiSoft Sandra 2004 professional has a lot of great informational modules and benchmarking tools. The first benchmark I ran was the CPU benchmark which will output the MIPS and MFLOPS for your CPU. To my surprise the Albatron KM18G Pro did a little better than the Abit NF7-S with in both areas of this test. This surprised me because in my past experience Albatron was in no way near the quality of an Abit board. It seems that Albatron has done a great deal of work recently to step it up a notch.

Sandra can also benchmark the multimedia ability of your system outputting the Integer aEMMX/aSSE and Floating-Point results from your system. Again the same situation holds true where the results vary between the FSB because of the CPUs overall speed. Again the Albatron board does better than Abit’s, more so than with the CPU benchmark. Though the results differences are not extraordinary there is a clear difference between the two.

SiSoft is renowned for memory bandwidth benchmarking, I used 1024MB (2×512) Corsair 3200LL which is one of their dual channel kits. All of the speeds were set to the fastest (2-2-2 1T) in the BIOS so that I would get the best performance possible. The testing was done at 166 with the DDR:CPU ratio being set to achieve 400MHz with the RAM. In this test however the NF7-S does better than the Albatron board, this is probably due to it having much more memory tweaking options.

PCMark04 is the latest version of the popular PCMark series that is an application-based benchmark and a premium tool for measuring overall PC performance. For this benchmark I did not include the graphics section of the testing so that the video card would not make a difference between the two systems. As you can see the Abit NF7-S scores a little over 300 points more than the Albatron board which isn’t a lot.

3DMark2001SE is the older but not obsolete benchmarking tool from Futuremark that utilizes DirectX 8.1 for testing. I ran the benchmark at 1024×768, 1280×1024, and 1600×1200 to get a full range of results to compare everything. Again I was actually surprised to see that the onboard video beat out the Radeon 9200SE on both motherboards except for at 1600×1200 which crashed every time I ran it. I am not exactly sure why the benchmark kept crashing but I was unable to resolve the problem with the things that I tried. However with the 9200SE results the Abit NF7-S does achieve a better score with each resolution.

3DMark03 is the latest version of the highly favored 3DMark series by combining full DirectX 9.0a support with completely new tests and graphics. As expected the onboard video did not do well with this test because it does not support DirectX 9 so it was unable to run some of the tests. The Albatron board did better with the 9200SE than the onboard video but the Abit NF7-S did better than both using the 9200SE.

Quake 3 is one of the most widely used real word benchmarking tools used among enthusiasts. Like with most of the synthetic benchmarks the onboard audio does really well and in this benchmarks case far surpasses that of the other two setups. Not only does it surpass the Radeon 9200SE on both motherboards but it does so in a fashion that would keep any gamer happy during those late night frag sessions.

Serious Sam 2 is much more graphic intensive than Quake 3 however the onboard video shows no signs of weakness. Once again the onboard video does better than the Radeon 9200SE on both motherboards by a good margin. At 1024×768 the results are quite impressive but with the resolutions above that you will start to see some choppiness when gaming.

Unreal Tournament 2003 is the final benchmark of this review which does a flyby and bot match test when the benchmark runs. With this final test we see the same kind of results as we did with the others, with the onboard video doing the best. Both motherboards using the Radeon 9200SE got basically identical results with both the flyby and bot match tests which shows that my methodology of testing worked exactly how I wanted it to. I really wanted to show the difference between two good systems with low end video cards so that people were able to make a good purchasing decision; hopefully I have.

Overclocking

Overclocking was somewhat of a task with this motherboard because of the inability to change the multiplier. Because of this factor I was not able to get the FSB higher than 166MHz which isn’t a very good overclock. The good thing about the BIOS is that it allows you to change the DDR:CPU ratio which will allow you to get more out of your memory but again this is somewhat limited due to the overclocking ability.

Even by changing the DDR:CPU ratio I was unable to get more than 400MHz which is again somewhat unimpressive. This board is not intended to be a powerhouse overclocker it is a microATX board with a totally different purpose. With this in mind the overclockability of the board is good for what is designed to do.

Conclusion

With everything taken into consideration with this motherboard I have to say that I do like it. Compared to the first nForce motherboards this board far surpasses what I thought that it was going to be able to do.

This board is microATX with everything onboard that you would need to build a full system along with a lot of extras which other boards just don’t provide. Not only does this board have a ton of features that are integrated into such a small package but it is also able to perform very well. This board would be great for a LAN box, budget system, or small project system.

The only cons that I would really point out is the fact that the multiplier is unable to be changed, there is no SATA or firewire, and there is no 5.1 audio. Overall I am going to give this motherboard a 9.5/10 and awarding it the OCmodshop Seal of Approval. I would like to thank Albatron for sending me this motherboard to review.

Pros

• microATX form factor
• Onboard GeForce 4 MX440
• Onboard NIC
• Onboard sound
• Dual channel capability
• TV-out cable included
• Blue PCB
• Onboard LAN
• AGP 8x

Cons

• Inability to change the CPU multiplier
• Lack of SATA and firewire
• No onboard 5.1 audio