We've seen here at VL that the Athlon XP (AXP) performs quite well against the Athlon 64 (A64), at a fraction of the cost. Make no mistake, the A64 still wins the majority of todays benchmarks, and when more 64-bit applications (as well as a mainstream 64-bit OS) it'll be a whole new ballgame, but in the meantime, those not ready for the 64-bit jump, the AXP is still a great choice for budget-minded power users.

has been on a roll, releasing products based on new technologies on a frequent basis. It does seem a little odd that late last year, given that the KT600 has been out for quite some time. However, given that there are a large number of AXP users, this board does offer quite a few features at an impressive price point.

Specifications

The KX600S Pro is packaged in a fairly plain box, without any fancy artwork. Ultimately, what is in the box is more important, and Albatron wisely places plenty of information on the box for the buyer to educate themselves about the product before purchasing.

Other than the motherboard, there are a couple of ribbon IDE cables, a floppy cable, an USB bracket, as well as a SATA cable and power splitter. Missing is the rear IO panel for ATX cases, which was a bit of a surprise since we're used to having these thrown in, but since there isn't any proprietary IO connection, Albatron probably felt it wasn't necessary. An installation guide, manual and driver CD rounds out the package.

The Albatron KX600S Pro

For the most part, the KX600S Pro is well laid out, but there are a few areas that could cause potential problems which we'll point out as we progress through the review. Though we're quite familiar with the nForce 2 and VIA KT400A here, this marks the first time we've seen a KT600 board. What has changed is the new VT8237 Southbridge, which adds SATA and RAID support, as well as two extra USB ports (motherboard manufacturer dependent).

The KX600S Pro is a Socket-A motherboard, and there is official support for 400FSB AXPs, which was missing from the KT400A. You'll notice that there are no holes for mounting larger heatsinks, but with the performance level of many clip based heatsinks now, this is not a large a problem as it would have been around this time last year. The capacitors are a little close for my comfort though, but the Thermalright SLK800 (the largest AMD, clip based cooler I have here) fits in without any problem, though it is a tight fit.

We've always preferred active cooling, as opposed to passive (fanless) and but Albatron's heatsink is quite large. The heatsink was noticably warm during testing, but not too hot to the touch. A passive solution is the right step towards a quiet PC, which I know some of our readers care about.

The ATX power connection isn't in our favorite spot, as the power cable will be in the vicinity of the CPU's heatsink and fan. This issue can be alieviated if you rout your power cable or tie it down with zip ties. Installing and removing the cable's connection to the motherboard isn't difficult, as Albatron leaves a fair amount of room around this connection.

Ram support is limited to three DIMMS, up to 3GB total memory capacity. The KT600 supports up to PC3200 ram in Single Channel mode. Ram support will vary, depending on what CPU you install though. Older 200FSB Athlons will force the memory controller to run at 266MHz, while 333/400FSB Athlons allows the full range of ram speed support.

You can also see above that both IDE connections are located directly beneath the memory slots. This location (rather than being located by the PCI slots) should help those who have tall ATX cases and need to run IDE cables to optical drives in the upper area of their case.

There are five PCI slots and one AGP slot for peripheral expansion. The onboard peripherals are not as abundant as we've seen on high-end boards, but five PCI slots should be enough for most users. The AGP slot is precariously close to the ram slots though. Those of you with large AGP cards will almost certainly have to remove it before changing your ram as the ram slot clips will not fully open with a large AGP card installed. It is possible to change ram without removing the AGP card, but don't come screaming at us if you snap your ram modules in half.

The KT600 Northbridge is paired with the VT8237 Southbridge, and handles the storage and connectivity options on the board. RAID-0, RAID-1, RAID-0+1, and JBOD configurations are all supported via the SATA connections, giving you more storage options than are typically available. 5.2 and 7.1 sound is supported, as well as VIA Gigabit Ethernet, 10/100 Ethernet and up to eight USB 2.0 ports.

Networking chores are handled by the 3Com Marvell 940-MV00. It is a Gigabit LAN controller, and a PCI device, which means it'll share the bandwidth with other PCI based parts.

Six channel sound is provided by the Realtek ALC655. Past Realtek solutions have provided decent quality, but they tend to rely on the CPU for a lot of tasks... more so than other onboard solutions.

Rounding things out are the rear IO connections. Located here are the two PS/2 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, a couple serial Com ports, one parallel and one game port, a Gigabit LAN Ethernet port, and three sound connections (Line-in/Line-out/MIC).

The BIOS

The Albatron KX600S Pro uses the familiar Pheonix AwardBIOS, complete with scrolling marquee and all. Thier implementation of the BIOS is very good, and there are plenty of options available for the enthusiast to make some system level tweaks.

On the main page, there are some standard settings you can adjust, such as system time, and your devices connected to the IDE channels. Under the main page of Advanced, you can set up your boot priority, right down to what device in what category. It is here you can access the Avanced BIOS and Chipset Features, as well as your overclocking options. Under Advanced BIOS Features, you have access to some basic CPU functions such as Intenal and External Cache.

By selecting the Advanced Chipset Features, we gain access to the guts of the KT600 chipset. For stability reasons, I usually leave the System BIOS and Video Ram Cacheable disabled, but feel free to enable them for a slight performance boost.

The DRAM Clock/Drive Control allows you to manually adjust the ram timings should you see fit. If your ram is of high quality, it would be wise to make some tweaks to squeeze some more performance out of the box.

The AGP and P2P Bridge Control is where you would make some adjustments to how the AGP interacts with the rest of the system.

Still under the Advanced main page, selecting the CPU & PCI Bus Control opens up your CPU and PCI frequency options. The Albatron board's FSB options can be opened with an unlocked CPU, and your range begins at 100MHz and tops out at 248MHz. Depending on your CPU and cooling, your milage will vary, but 248MHz seems like a real longshot for the majority of users.

Of course, high FSBs will cause some AGP and PCI issues, and although the BIOS will auto-adjust the optimal ratios for you once you select the FSB, you can still manually make adjustments yourself. The range here is 6:2:1 to 3:2:1, but unfortunently, there is no way to manually set a specific AGP or PCI clock, and the motherboard will do its best to make it as close to 66MHz (AGP) and 33MHz (PCI) as it can.

You can also adjust your CPU's multiplier, from 5x to 24x, giving you plenty of options when used in conjunction with the FSB adjustments.

Like the CPU and PCI ratios, you also have control over your ram's speed via a similar method. The ratio options are 1.33x, 1.66x, and 2.00x, and depending on your FSB and ram quality you can make some adjustments here.

The next group of options are the voltages. For the CPU, it tops out at 2.1v which isn't too bad for the Athlon XP. The AGP voltage ceiling is also very generous, topping out at 1.8v. For DDR, your max voltage is 2.8v, which isn't so bad when you consider that the majority of ram modules that require more than that are of the PC4000 variety. Since the KT600 only officially supports PC3200, and overclocking to PC4000 isn't possible, we won't ding the KX600S Pro for that.

The next page of note is the Peripheral setup. Depending on what kind of video card you have, you can manually set what slot (AGP or PCI) as your initial display.

The VIA OnChip IDE Device page allows some settings where you can enable or disable some of the VT8237 Southbridge's functions.

The VIA OnChip PCI Device page gives you the choice of enabling and disabling some of the onboard peripherals such as sound and LAN.

Finally, on the Super IO Device page, you can enable or disable your legacy connections.

Overclocking

To test the board's overclocking ability, I pulled out our trusty Athlon XP 1800+ DUT3C and paired it with a Koolance Exos-Al. Though the Koolance uses 1/4" OD hoses, the performance is quite good, and should be more than enough to squeeze as much as we can out of the CPU, which I've gotten to 2400MHz on our nForce 2 boards.

That being said, overclocking the KX600S Pro was far from being easy. I managed to get into Windows at 12x200 with a vCore of 2.1v, but the system would immediately reboot as soon as I logged in. Increasing the AGP voltage to 1.7v and DDR to 2.8v did not help matters, even when running the ram at 3-4-4-8-2T. 11x200 fared no better as the system would reboot at the OS load screen. Heat wasn't an issue, as the Koolance kept the CPU in the low 40s°C.

I should point out that up until now, our ram was running at PC3200 speeds. By adjusting the speed to as close as I could to PC2700, overclocking got a whole lot easier.

Above is just a screenshot of what I'm talking about. I actually got the ram speed up a little higher than what you see, but I think it's clear what needs to be done. With our ram running a lot slower, we worked towards our final OC.

Regardless of voltage and multiplier, ~210FSB was the ceiling. We managed 212FSB, but the system wasn't even stable enough to do an Alt-PrtScn. In the 210-211FSB range, the system would repeatably crash during benchmarks. 209FSB needed a boost to 2.0v, but after a couple days, I was able to lower it down to 1.95v while still maintaining stability. Though I was generally satisfied with the end result, I wasn't terribly pleased about neutering my ram for it.

One thing I should point out is that the Watch Dog Timer feature is a godsend. Not once did I need to flip a jumper to reset the CMOS, as the board reset itself whenever I had a bad overclock (which was often). In most cases, the system would reboot, leaving the previous failed settings intact for us to adjust. In the cases where I went for a ridiculous OC, the system simply shut down, then rebooted, resetting itself to safe/default settings. This is a real time saver, and I wish more manufacturers would implement a similar feature.

Test Setup

Albatron KX600S Pro: Athlon 2500+ (11x166), 2 x 512MB Kingston HyperX PC4000 (2.5-3-3-6), AIW Radeon 9800 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, VIA Hyperion 4in1 drivers 4.51, ATI Catalyst 4.1.

ABIT NF7-S 2.0: Athlon 2500+ (11x166), 2 x 512MB Kingston HyperX PC4000 (2.5-3-3-6), AIW Radeon 9800 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, nVidia Unified Driver 3.3, ATI Catalyst 4.1.

SiSoft Sandra 2004

Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and memory speeds, using the 32-bit 2004 version.

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

Though the KT600 isn't quite the nForce 2 killer, it appears that the performance is not too shabby. The performance difference is between 1% to 2%, which is just within our margin or error.

CPU Multimedia Benchmark

For the MMX tests, we have a much different story. The nForce 2 Ultra totally dominates here by over 60%.

Memory Benchmark

Despite the Dual Channel (DC) architecture, the Single Channel (SC) KT600 takes the lead in our memory benchmarks. I was quite surprised for a couple reasons, as DC typically outperforms SC platforms for this test, and the large gap in performance in the MMX tests. Nonetheless, score one here for the KX600 Pro.

PiFast

A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

Lower is better

Moving on to our real-world tests, we see the nForce 2 fighting back and out pacing the KT600 by 0.15 seconds. It was a close call, but repeated tests did not change the end result.

VirtualDub Audio Extraction

We ripped the audio of at 44 100Hz, no compression using VirtualDub 1.5.8 (Build 18068). Times are in seconds, and lower is better.

Lower times are better

Not much of a difference between the two setups, but the nForce 2 setup does hold a slight one second lead at the same clock speed as the KT600 board.

TMPGEnc 2.521

We used the same Animatrix file and the WAV created from VirtualDub to encode the AVI file to MPEG-2 (a somewhat realistic chore as DVDs are MPEG-2). For the AVI to MPEG-2, we used a bitrate of 5000k/Sec, as this is the midrange for a DVD, which is typically between 1000k/Sec to 10,000k/Sec. Frame size was set to 720x480 (DVD Std) and 16:9 NTSC. Note that lower scores are better.

Lower times are better

Another close battle, but in the end, the nForce 2 proves to be a slightly quicker platform, beating the KT600 by 9 seconds.

Unreal Tournament 2003: Antalus, Min Detail @ 640

Quake 3: Arena, Min Detail @ 640

Although the KX600S Pro is no slouch for gaming, its performance is no match for the nForce 2. The gap in Unreal Tournament 2003 was fairly wide, but the Quake 3 gap was even wider.

Subsystem Testing

The first thing we'll check is the audio. We downloaded and installed to test its CPU utilization.

Much like every other Realtek solution we've looked at, CPU utilization was very high throughout testing. The average utilization was about 9%, with 7% being the low point, but the more intensive tests spiked at 14%. Today's CPUs should be a fast enough to compensate for this, but let's put it to the test in a real-world environment and see how this effects UT 2003 performance.

UT 2003 Inferno Sound Tests

For our UT2003 tests, we ran dm-Inferno benchmarks at 640x480, minimum detail with sound on and off. This was repeated at 1024x768. The reasoning is at low detail and resolution, the work will fall on the CPU and motherboard subsystem. Higher resolution is more representative of actual game play for most users.

UT2003 Low Resolution

At low resolution, the framerates take quite a beating. We lose about 24fps with sound enabled, but before we jump all over the Realtek, let's take a look at a resolution more representative of today's gamers.

UT2003 High Resolution

With more work placed on the video card, the gap between sound on and off is not as large. It is still present, with a 5fps difference, but you probably won't notice this while dodging rockets.

In terms of sound quality, I found the Realtek to be merely acceptable. For basic MP3, and movie playback, I didn't notice much distortion at all. Adjusting to higher volumes did result in more static, but stopped once I got to the desired volume. Gameplay was fine, with no distortion, though I did find the bass to be a bit low. Line-In recording was terrible though. No matter how much tweaking was done through the software, there was this horrible buzz in the background. I did manage to decrease the "buzz", but ultimately it never went away.

Hard Drive Performance

We used HD Tach to gauge read performance with our Maxtor 80GB HDD. Although the drive uses a PATA interface, I did test the SATA with our ABIT PATA-to-SATA converter. Please note that a true SATA drive may have different results, but our goal was to setup a scenario as close to apples-to-apples as we could.

Network Performance

We used to test the networking speed, and Windows Task Manager for CPU usage. We copied a variety of install files, totalling 758 MB, varying in sizes of 300kb to as much as 60MB per file from the KX600S Pro machine, to our IC7-MAX3 box, which uses an Intel CSA Gigabit Ethernet controller. We also performed the same test with an ISO image, totalling 761MB.

Both systems were connected via a Cat-5E crossover cable, which should prevent any bottlenecks that would arise with our standard 10/100 Linksys router.

Small File Test

Download speeds averaged about 26.26MB/sec, and upload speeds about 44.7MB/sec which isn't bad, but the CPU utilization was very high.

Large File Test

We see some improved numbers here with the ISO. Download speeds averaged about 28.43MB/sec, and upload speeds about 46.1MB/sec which is virtually identical to the small file test numbers, but CPU utilization was much lower.

Final Words

Upon it's initial release, the KT600 was dubbed the nForce 2 killer. What we have seen today says otherwise, but the Albatron KX600S Pro still makes a strong showing. Application performance, with the exception of the SiSoft MMX tests, was very strong, performing on par with the nForce 2. Gaming was another story, as it fell quite a way behind nVidia's part in the low resolution tests.

The Realtek solution was not well implemented at all. It is a major CPU hog, and the recording quality isn't something I would dare use if sound editing is your thing. There is also no 3rd party RAID controller (the Southbridge does make up for it), and although it shaves some of the cost off the board, you won't have the same expansion options as you would with a high-end board. I'll touch back on this in a moment.

Overclocking was something we weren't too happy with. Although we did end up with a decent CPU overclock, it was because we had to scale back the DDR speed to PC2700. Considering that we were using some high quality ram, and the board is rated for DDR400, you can see why we were a little disappointed.

If it sounds like we're being a little hard on the KX600S Pro, that is because we're looking at it from an enthusiast's perspective. However, the board is targeted more at the mainstream user, and in that case there are several areas we did like.

For casual overclockers, there is some performance headroom, and the Watch Dog Timer is a fantastic feature for overclocks that have gone awry. The 3Com Gigabit Ethernet is forward thinking, as that is the next step for home Ethernet cabling. The Realtek solution, though we've panned it, is good enough for day to day use, and VIA's VT8237 Southbridge is a great chip that offers RAID support if you need it.

Pros: Gigabit Ethernet, Watch Dog Timer, decent performance, cheap.

Cons: Realtek chip not well suited for sound recording, and uses a lot of CPU cycles. Overclocking issues.

Bottom Line: We mentioned earlier that this is not a high-end board, and as a result, you won't be busting your wallet for this board. With a street price of about 58$ USD, this board is certainly worth a look if you're looking into building a budget box to complement your high-end rig.

If you have any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.

HOME