Introduction & Tested Hardware:

The Albatron K8 Ultra-U Pro mainboard, as the name suggests, is designed for the Athlon 64 CPU series, socket 754 to be specific. Although it’s a rather budget minded board, Albatron did its best to pack the board with almost all the features present on higher end products from competing brands.

Albatron has been around for quite some time, its lower popularity in Europe (and Belgium, the rainy-day country) is caused by the low availability, which is set to change in the near future, with more hardware enthusiast minded and budget friendly products.

If you seek then you shall find, and I’ve had the pleasure of working with some Albatron products in the past, one of them, a Geforce 4 MX card, proved to be quite an overclocker, landing me a place in the TOP 10 at Futuremark’s ORB (Online ResultBrowser). So I’m very curious how this board will perform and overclock.

To give the Albatron K8 Ultra-U Pro some competition I bought an MSI K8M Neo-V, at first I was a bit skeptic about the integrated video but it can easily be disabled and performance of the board is identical to any run of the mill VIA KT800 based motherboard.

I paired both motherboards with an A64 3000+ (with the older 130nm Newcastle core, 512Kb lvl2 cache and running at 2Ghz), using the AMD Boxed cooling. A single stick of 512Mb PC3200 Mushkin LVLII V2 memory was also used, since the socket 754 in a single memory channel platform having more then 1 stick will not increase memory bandwidth.

“in the box”



Click for bigger picture...

K8Ultra-U series mainboard

2x IDE Cable 80 wire

FDC Cable

SATA Power Cord / SATA Cable

I/O Shield

Installation and Setup Driver CD

User Manual

This is an average content, with everything you might need. Optional features are the Game Port Bracket, SPDIF & FRONT AUDIO Port Bracket and the USB brackets. Stuff most people don’t use, except for the USB brackets. Those would have come in handy.

Let's take a look at what this board can offer the end user, a closer look at the specifications ->

Specs and features:



The K8 Ultra-U Pro board is powered by the lesser known ULi M1689 Chipset, it offers support for DDR1 and AGP, so it’s not a next generation chipset, it does however provide a very good solution for building a budget friendly motherboard with a large range of features (SATA/Ethernet/AC’97 sound)


from HTT Consortium website



Click for bigger picture...


The full K8 Ultra-U Pro specs can be found here, the features which stand out are the two DDR DIMM slots (DDR400 PC3200), good for a total memory capacity up to 2 Gb. This means you can’t use any memory sticks larger then 1 Gb, but this is not different from most main boards nowadays. The AGP port is and 8x version, with a maximal bandwidth of 2.1 GB/s according to the box.

This chipset is also capable to offer us up to eight USB 2.0 ports. Four of them can be found directly on the rear I/O panel. The others can be used only if you connect separate USB ports to the USB connector on the mainboard (some cases have front-USB ports, this would be ideal), Albatron did not include an extra USB bracket, which limits your options a bit. Next to the default IDE facilities this chipset supports also two SATA connectors.

Albatron was so kind to send us the Ultra version of this series. What does this mean concretely? A 10/100 LAN port ! But that’s not everything. There is also 6 channel audio present. The chip used to control it is the Realtek ALC655.

You might have noticed it, there’s no firewire connection available. No drama, but now that high capacity MP3 players become more popular (Apple Ipod for example) as well as digital video cameras, this could have given a nice finishing touch on the board.

The design and especially the lay-out is quit important, more of his on the next page >>>

Motherboard Layout:



The first thing that I noticed was the location of the ATX power connectors, they are situated right in the middle of the board, the worst location imaginable, as they sit between the CPU and AGP port, it’s a guarantee for a cable mess. If you are using an after market CPU cooler and VGA cooler then those cables will be squeezed in tight. Moving the power connectors to the side of the board would resolve this.

The IDE and SATA ports are situated at the side of the board, which is very good. The ULi chipset is cooled by a small passive heatsink (with thermal pad), its very low profile, so fitting larger AGP cards won’t pose a problem.



Click for bigger picture...


The memory slots are way up the mainboard, this can possible pose a problem when using a large 3rd party CPU heatsink, as it will hover over the 1st ramslot, however I tested it with a Zalman CNPS7000-CU and found that there was enough free space to fit 2 ram modules without issue.

The back plate of the A64 mounting bracket is not glued on and can be removed easily, quite a plus if you want to use an exotic cooler which needs its own back plate.



Click for bigger picture...


Time for some steaming action, overclocking & benchmarking ->

Test Setup:

As mentioned in the intro, I paired up the motherboards with overclocker friendly hardware, Mushkin's TCCD memory, Antec's 550W TrueControl PSU and one Albatron Geforce 4 MX480 AGP card which has run stable with AGP speeds up to 105Mhz in the past.

The test system was installed with Windows XP SP2, latest video card and system drivers, the BIOS which came shipped with the board was used during all tests to ensure an "out of the box" experience.

Piotke's Test Setup
CPU	AMD Athlon 64 3000+
Mainboard	MSI K8M Neo-V Albatron K8 Ultra-U Pro
Cooling	Zalman CNPS7000B-Cu
Memory	512 Mb PC 3200 Mushkin LII V2 TCCD
PSU	Antec True Control 550 watt

Overclocking:

MSI K8M Neo-V

The MSI board is equipped with onboard VGA, but its performance is nothing to write home about, ~1500 in 3DMark2001SE, as good/bad as an old TNT2 Ultra, it's decent enough for everyday office applications, but you can forget about gaming.

The MSI bios offers only a limited amount of tweaks, most notable was the lack of advanced memory timings or voltage options for the CPU, here's what the MSI offers the hardware enthusiast:

CPU Multiplier control

HTT Speed adjustment

Ram voltage (up to 2.85 Vddr)

Memory Cas Latency control

Memory / HTT divider (266/300/333/400)

Using popular overclocking tools like A64 Tweaker and Clockgen I was able to lower memory timings to CL2 2-2-5 and increase the HTT speed easily, the end result however was a quite unstable system. The maximum HTT speed this board allowed through Clockgen in Windows was 240Mhz, but with the memory running async to keep things running stable. The board had cold boot issues when setting certain overclocks which proved stable in Windows, which became quite unnerving.

Albatron K8 Ultra-U Pro

The BIOS of the K8 Ultra-U Pro has a few more options up its sleeve, a varied selection of voltages and memory timings control allowed me to tweak the system to its limit from within in the BIOS; CPU voltage can be increased to 1.7v vcore, DDR voltage up to 2.85v.

CPU Multiplier control

CPU voltage control (up to 1.7v)

HTT Speed adjustment

Ram voltage (up to 2.85 Vddr)

Full Memory Latency Control

Memory / HTT divider (266/300/333/400)

The only pitfall of this board is the lack of an AGP/PCI lock, when you increase the HTT you also indirectly the speed of the aforementioned devices. The GF4 card can easily handle higher AGP speeds, but the hard disk used was negatively influenced by the increase PCI speed, resulting in data corruption. At first I got the system running at 260Mhz HTT and was quite impressed, however I needed to back the overclock down to 245Mhz before the system could pass benchmarking and stability tests. Although a 5mhz advantage over the MSI does not seem a lot, I have to point out that I did not the cold-boot issues with the Albatron, which puts this board in the lead, overclock-wise.

CPU Temperature

When you start overclocking, it's a good idea to keep a close eye on the CPU temperature, both boards feature system health monitor tools, and allow you to shut the system down in case of overheating. The MSI board showed a CPU temp of 32°C from a cold boot, while the Albatron displayed only 24°C. With a room temp of ~20° the load temps were very closely matched, 62°C on the MSI, 59°C on the Albatron.


Benchmarks:

I ran a selection of benchmarks which rely heavily on the motherboard's performance:

3DMark 2001SE

SuperPi

Sisoft Sandra Memory Benchmark

Quake 3 Arena Timedemo


Results @ Stock speeds








At stock speed the Albatron is a tad faster then the MSI, but this can be related to the slightly higher HTT speed of the Albatron which is not 200Mhz but 200.5Mhz at default settings.

---

Results @ Overclocked speeds

(note: The MSI's memory is running asynchronously to the HTT)








Overclocked the Albatron is remarkably faster. The synchronous HTT & memory clock speed result in higher bandwidth giving a noticeable performance boost.

Let's wrap things up ->

Conclusion:

I was very pleased with the K8 Ultra-U Pro; it offers decent performance combined with rock stability. Packed with almost every feature that can be found nowadays on higher end main boards, it makes the board suitable for almost every user, almost. Die hard overclockers looking for an S754 board might want to elsewhere, but for those who just want to overclock their system with stock cooling, this board will provides a hassle free solution, I've gained 450Mhz, for free, with the A64 CPU I used.

The absence of an USB bracket and fire-wire port are the could be considered as min points, but when you learn the price of the board, you might understand that they cut costs. At Newegg.com the Albatron can be bought for $66 at the time of writing! Building a very budget minded S754 system has never been this interesting.

PRO
Rock stable, even overclocked
Very competitively priced
Overclocker friendly BIOS

CON
Not the best overclocker around (no PCI/AGP lock)
No USB bracket or Fire-Wire port

I would like to thank Tomasz from Albatron for providing us with the review sample.



Question/Comments: forum thread