Result and general impression
+++ The Albatron K8X800 pro has at present a price of approx. of 70 euro (02/2005) and is thereby appropriate in the good centre of the 754 Mainboards. However the equipment and the overclock features isn’t in the centre zone, because large variety at different voltage adjustments are found neither on one of the tested SocketA Mainboards, nor on the so far tested Socket 754 Mainboards. Because beside the CPU voltage (VCore) you can also adjust the Northbridge, Southbridge, video card and memory voltage in a healthy relationship. And during the important Vcore attitude the voltage is adjustable even from 0,8 to 1.9 Volt ! The plus goes clearly to the company Albatron, who did not shrink from costs and troubles to arrange it as pleasant the Overclockers here as possible. In addition, the variety of the features hardly left desires open, because beside 3 memory banks the K8X800 pro offers 6 pci Slots, 2 SATA150 connections, which can operate also as a RAID, 6 channel sound (however only with the usual three connections) and 8 USB of connections, whereby 2 of them are optional. Only the arrangement of the floppy connection is rather unfavorably appropriate and is under the last pci Slot, but who needs a floppy 😉 The performance of the K8X800 pro Mainboard lay however only in the centre zone, but is probably less because of Albatron than the used chipset. The overclocking of the passive cooled K8T800 chipset was not much better than with the last reviewed ASRock K8S8X Mainboard with SiS 964 chipset and even some MHz over default 200 MHz the Northbridge doesn’t run astable. Thus with an increase of the Northbridge voltage there’s also some more power in it, whereby you should better spend the Northbridge an active cooling device. If one went nevertheless somewhat too high, that the Mainboard refuse the service, helps pressing the “insert” key during switching the PC on, in order to set the frequencies again back on moderate speeds.
Conclusion: Albatron will let certainly strike some overclocker hearts higher with the K8X800 pro and offers good equipment at a favourable price. And really more than worth mentioning is also the very generous adjustment possibility of almost all Mainboard voltages – salute ! Except the somewhat small performance compared with other 754 chipset (both with the older Win98SE and with WinXP SP2) the Mainboard manufacturer Albatron shows with the K8X800 pro how the wind blows or how the albatross fly.
Thanks to Albatron for their support.
**** All Socket 754 mainboard tests since 01.08.2004 are based on an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ with a HIS Excalibur Radeon 9600 Pro graphic card, Kingmax 256 MB PC2700 memory module and the following software configuration: Windows 98 SE, DirectX 9b, Catalyst 3.6 graphic driver and 3DMark 2003. Since all benchmark results should only offer a comparison among themselves, I select Win 98 SE for a faster OS installation which is of course not the usual OS for Athlon 64 systems but enough for a comparison.