Far Cry

Three FPS lead for MSI here.

Half-Life 2

And again here.

Unreal Tournament 2004 - as-convoy

MSI’s solution edges out Albatron’s solution across the as-convoy map.

Subsystem Testing

HD Tach - SATA

The SATA solution on the Albatron board is atrocious. 5% or lower is generally good, but Albatron’s is 8%!

Sound Performance - Commanche 4

Both sound solutions eat up about 6% of the performance. However the Neo4 is slightly faster as far as fps is concerned.

Overclocking and Stability

Albatron's K8SLi was extremely frustrating to me as far as overclocking is concerned. I couldn’t manage a meager 220fsb with 10x multiplier even with loosened timings to 2.5-3-3-7. Any gains that I had with the motherboard were quickly lost by being forced to have a really low multiplier, and/or extremely compromised memory timings. Basically if you want to overclock at all, this is not the motherboard for you. I should also note that lowering the HTT also didn’t have any effect.

Part of the reason is for no half steps on the multiplier. For instance it has 11x, 10x, 9x, etc, instead of 11x, 10.5x, 10x, 9.5x, etc. The same goes for the voltages on the ram. I honestly spent days to get any gains at all, and any good gains I got were not even stable enough to run 3Dmark01 10 times in a loop.

Final Words

The board operated very well in stock conditions but didn’t operate virtually at all in an overclocked environment. The board offers some very interesting solutions. It has virtually everything onboard that any user could want. SLi, NIC, plenty of USB ports, sound, etc. It only has one onboard NIC but for most that will be more than sufficient. The SLi solution without a jumper block, or flip card worked flawlessly, and without touching the FSB/Multi etc everything worked great. Something else that immediately comes to mind about the board is although the total height of the board is ATx spec the width is significantly shorter. I could see this used for custom made boxes for HTPC solutions for those wanting something more robust than a mATx board could offer. However it makes me wonder why Albatron simply didn’t make it a mATx solution in the first place.

Another thing to note is that in virtually all the benchmarks at stock speed, the MSI solution was faster. Although it was only by a small margin, when considering overclocking potential, the Albatron solution looses outright.

It really seems to me that this board is really pigeonholed to be a board used by the budget conscious or someone looking for a specific project. It certainly won’t find a home in a 'would be' God box. At $109 US it’s quite a bit cheaper than the $130 US MSI solution, but when put up against something that had dual gigabit Ethernet, more USB ports, a better onboard sound solution, better overclocking, faster subsystems, and overall just a faster more feature rich board, there is certainly a reason for that. Still with everything it lacks I must honestly say that in a blind taste test, I probably wouldn’t be able to differentiate which board I was using based on the stock clock speeds. But in truth when I was running the MSI solution I was running it overclocked all the time.

In short this board is cheaper than the MSI board, has the exotic capabilities of SLi, is decently quick, has a smaller form factor than what most think of with ATx, and operates flawlessly at stock speeds. For the cost, and the features it would be hard to find a better solution, but after using MSI’s I would be a liar to say that I would switch to it.

Pros: Smaller footprint, Blue PCB, Very stable, Lots of onboard features, “Glueless” SLi, Cheap

Cons: Lackluster overclocking, Limited settings and timings, High CPU utilization on all the onboard items, Poor subsystem

The Bottom Line: If you want a small board for a specific project, don’t like to dabble in overclocking, or are extremely cost conscious and can’t afford the more expensive but faster Asus, DFI or MSI board, this should fit the bill. Honestly saving up a few more bucks and throwing out the cost conservativeness for a different solution sounds like a much better idea in my book.

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