Albatron's KX400+ Pro motherboard

Albatron isn’t entering the PC market blind, though. Jack Ko, formerly a founder of Gigabyte, is now their CEO. He brings with him a wealth of experience and a solid reputation.

Today we’re looking at Albatron’s KX400+ Pro, a KT333-based motherboard that claims to be the first to support DDR400 memory. There’s a lot more to the KX400+ Pro than claimed DDR400 support, so let’s dive in and see just what Albatron is offering.

The specs We’ll set the stage by looking at the board’s feature set.

A couple of things jump out right away: first, the board has six PCI slots, and second, there’s no integrated Ethernet or RAID. Let’s go over some of the highlights in more detail, because there’s a little more to this board than you might get from just looking at its spec sheet.

The layout

The KT400+ Pro isn’t laden with integrated peripherals, so its layout is clean and uncluttered. It’s a little surprising that Albatron has gone with a boring PCB color on the KT400+ Pro, especially since their GeForce4 Ti 4200 graphics card comes on a blue PCB—not that PCB color matters.

Albatron adheres to the AGP 2.0 spec, which means that there’s plenty of room for long GeForce4 Ti 4600 graphics cards to extend beyond the AGP slot. There are a few capacitors in the vicinity, and the DIMM slots are very close, but my VisionTek GeForce4 Ti 4600 slides in nice and smooth.

The DIMM slots are awfully close to the AGP slot, so close that one has to to remove the graphics card to flip the DIMM tabs open. Having to remove your graphics card every time you want to swap DIMMs is a pain, but it’s a necessary evil given the KT400+ Pro’s inclusion of six PCI slots.

With six full PCI slots, there isn’t enough space on the PCB for the AGP slot to peacefully coexist with the DIMM slot tabs. The only fix I can see is either ditching the CNR slot, which could yield a few centimeters of clearance, or moving the IDE ports towards the lower edge of the board instead of beside the DIMM slots.

The KT400+ Pro supports up to 3GB of DDR SDRAM, but on-board IDE RAID is conspicuously absent. At this point, I would have thought that IDE RAID would be a standard feature for enthusiast-oriented motherboards, if not for actual RAID applications, then at least for the extra IDE ports. Extra IDE ports can cut down on the number of devices forced to share IDE channels in a slave/master relationship. Personally, I like my PC to be involved in as little S&M as possible.

AMD’s Athlon XP processors feature an internal diode that should produce more accurate core temperature measurements than external thermal probes. The KX400+ Pro’s socket doesn’t have a thermal probbe, and it’s the first board that I’ve seen that reads the CPU temperature directly from AMD’s internal diode.

I wouldn’t recommend using older Spitfire-based Durons or Thunderbird-based Athlons in the KX400+ Pro, though. AMD’s older processors don’t have internal diodes, and the absence of a socket-mounted thermal probe means you won’t get any thermal monitoring.

You’ll find all the usual suspects in the KX400+ Pro’s port cluster. Those two USB ports support USB 2.0, and the board can support four more USB ports via a single PCI slot plate. You get only the standard audio jacks with the KX400+ Pro, but there’s actually a set of S/PDIF output pins on the board for what seems to be an optional output header. A number of more recent motherboards with integrated audio support digital inputs and outputs, and it’s good to see that the KX400+ Pro has at least very basic support built in.

Just a few chips The KX400+ Pro doesn’t have a lot of integrated peripheral chips on board, but we’ll give things a once-over anyway.

VIA’s KT333 north bridge directs traffic on the KX400+ Pro, despite the motherboard’s deceptive name. The newer KT400 chipset has been announced, but its lack of official support for DDR 400 memory may not entice manufacturers to switch over right away, despite some improvements in the new chipset.

The KX400+ Pro features a VT8235 south bridge chip, which is newer than the VT8233A that you’ll see on a lot of KT333 boards. The VT8235 supports VIA’s new 533MB/sec V-Link, but only when paired with the KT400’s VT8368 north bridge, so the KX400+ Pro’s V-Link is still only capable of 266MB/sec. This new south bridge chip does support six USB 2.0 ports, which means that the KX400+ Pro doesn’t need to farm out USB duties to another chip.

Everyone and his brother is using Realtek’s ALC 650 6-channel audio chip, and Albatron doesn’t break from the pack. The ALC 650 sounds pretty good for an integrated chip, and Albatron’s implementation sounds no better or worse than Abit’s on the AT7 MAX. You won’t get sound quality on par with nForce, but the audio fidelity is at least as good as any other integrated offering I’ve tested for casual listening, including chips from C-Media.

Two smack-talkin’ BIOSes Albatron borrows a page from Gigabyte and specs the KX400+ Pro with two BIOS chips, one to hold the current CMOS settings, and the other to serve as a backup.

Frying a BIOS is rare, at least for me, but I like having that extra layer of protection if the power should happen to go out midway through a BIOS update. A backup BIOS isn’t essential, but it is a nice little touch that sets the KX400+ Pro apart from just about every motherboard out there short of those from Gigabyte.

What makes the KX400+ Pro’s BIOS really stand out is the fact that it talks—in four languages. Instead of BIOS beep codes, the KX400+ Pro’s Voice Genie gives you descriptive audio messages in Chinese, English, Japanese, or German. I’m not sure if a talking BIOS is more or less useful than the 2-digit LED BIOS read outs that you’ll find on some other motherboards, but it’s certainly a novel approach. It’s definitely better than having to decipher beep codes.

The KX400+ Pro’s name suggests that it supports DDR400 memory, but that’s really not the case. You can get your memory bus to 400MHz by overclocking the front side bus to 160MHz and setting the DDR:CPU ratio to 2.5, but that’s about it. The KX400+ Pro’s BIOS doesn’t give you the ability to set the PCI or AGP clock dividers arbitrarily, nor can you lock down each bus to a set speed, so you may have a bit of a rough time getting AGP and PCI cards to cooperate with an overclocked bus.

Despite not having a PCI and AGP bus divider control, the KX400+ Pro does well in the voltage department. You have access to voltage ranges from 2.5 to 2.8V in 0.1V increments for memory, and processor voltages are available between 1.1V and 1.85V in 0.025V increments.

Memory-wise, the KX400+ Pro’s BIOS exposes all the standard memory tweaks with the exception of memory interleave. We’ll have to get into the benchmarks before we see what kind of impact that will have on performance.

It’s actually been a while since I’ve seen a BIOS screen with anything other than white text on a blue background, so the blue on grey is a nice change of pace.

Our testing methods All tests were run three times, with their results averaged, using the following test systems.

Today we’re facing off the KX400+ pro against another KT333-based motherboard in Abit’s AT7 MAX. The test will show just how well Albatron has implemented VIA’s KT333 chipset, and you can reference our latest Socket A chipset comparison to see where the KT333 stands when compared to competing chipsets from SiS and NVIDIA.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

The test systems’ Windows desktop was set at 1024×768 in 32-bit color at a 75Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests. Most of the 3D gaming tests used the high detail image quality settings, with the exception that the resolution was set to 640×480 in 32-bit color.

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.

Memory performance

SiSoft Sandra’s memory benchmark shows the two KT333-based motherboards yielding virtually identical memory bandwidth scores. Memory bandwidth isn’t everything, but at least the KX400+ Pro is realizing as much of the KT333’s potential memory bandwidth as the AT7 MAX.

Business performance

In Business Winstone, AT7 MAX and KX400+ Pro essentially tie.

Ditto for last year’s Content Creation Winstone…

… And for this year’s Content Creation Winstone.

At least in business and multimedia applications, Albatron’s KX400+ Pro performs to within a margin of error of Abit’s AT7 MAX. Not bad for a new entrant.

3DMark2001 SE

Albatron’s board is just a hair ahead of the AT7 MAX in 3DMark2001 SE

Quake III Arena

The trend continues in Quake III Arena.

Serious Sam SE

Serious Sam SE rounds out our gaming benchmarks, and really there’s no reason to do any more. Again, Albatron’s KX400+ Pro is right there with Abit’s AT7 MAX.

IDE performance

In WinBench 99’s Disk WinMark Business test, the KX400+ Pro scores better than the AT7 MAX, but not by much at all.

The Abit and Albatron boards swap places in the High-End Disk WinMark test, and this time it’s the KX400+ Pro just trailing the AT7 MAX. Overall, the performance of the two boards’ ATA implementations is quite similar, at least with an ATA/100 hard drive.

Overclocking We were able to get our Athlon XP 1800+ running on a 140MHz bus with the KX400+ Pro, but we hit a wall after that and any CPU-intensive tasks would hard-lock the system. Testing suggests that the limiting factor here was the CPU rather than the motherboard, since overclocking the same processor on Abit’s AT7 produced similar results.

Just for fun, I also threw an Athlon MP 2100+ into the system to see how fast I could get the front side bus running with an unlocked multiplier. Curiously, the KX400+ Pro’s multiplier control doesn’t work with Athlon MPs, and I wasn’t able to change anything from the BIOS. Doh! I don’t have any unlocked Athlon XP processors lying around, so I’m not sure if the same limitations will apply to those of you who have filled in the bridge gaps. As it stands, I’m not sure I can fault Albatron for not supporting multiplier manipulation for Athlon MPs on a single-processor motherboard.

Conclusions Albatron’s KX400+ Pro is available for US$99, which is a lot cheaper than the $150 you’ll pay for an AT7 MAX, but a lot more expensive than other KT333-based motherboards with similar specs. Availability may be an issue, too, because I was only able to find one retailer on Pricewatch that carries the KX400+ Pro. Albatron has only been around for a few months, so I would expect availability to increase over time.

The KX400+ Pro is an impressive first offering from Albatron; it performs well, and its stability was impeccable during our testing. However, I’m not sure to whom I would recommend the board. The lack of IDE RAID and integrated networking seems to cater to picky enthusiasts who eschew integrated components, but then what’s the integrated audio doing there? For mainstream users, six full PCI slots is overkill, and I would have preferred at least an integrated NIC. I’d also hesitate to put anything other than an Athlon XP or Morgan-core Duron processor on the board because of its exclusive use of the internal CPU diode to read processor temperatures.

As part of Albatron’s first barrage of motherboards, the KX400+ Pro leaves me hopeful, and I’m definitely looking forward to their next wave of products. Albatron seems to have performance and stability nailed, so it’s just a question of upgrading the feature set to better compete with older and more established brands. Something tells me we’re going to be seeing a lot of Albatron in the future.