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Albatron K8SLI Mainboard One other point of note is the physical BIOS chip. Below the Phoenix BIOS chip you can see a small connection point. This spot allows you to plug in the Albatron back up BIOS module. Personally, I’ve never had a BIOS chip get corrupted before but think about all the time you spend getting your rig just right and the horror you would feel if a BIOS flash nuked it forcing you to replace a board. We all know that practically, we aren’t going to wait around without a machine for a RMA on a BIOS replacement. To this end, should the unthinkable happen, the BIOS recovery module may be plugged in, a jumper set and bingo, your BIOS is flashed back to normal and you’re back in business.
The expansion slots make the board look more like a micro ATX board with only two standard PCI slots. But remember you have two PCI-E x 16, two PCI-E x 1 and two standard PCI slots bringing possible expansion spaces available up to six. With the Albatron having onboard 5.1 sound and an onboard NIC there isn’t much else you could need after video card(s). In this same pic you can see the 12v AUX power connector almost between the CPU socket and the uppermost PCI-E x 1 slot.
The nForce4 chipset sports a small aluminum active cooler. Nothing fancy outside of its being constructed of gold anodized aluminum which contrasts nicely against the clean blue PCB of the Albatron K8SLI board.
Wrapping up our tour of the SLI Albatron board we find three fan headers. The CPU fan header rests at the left of the bottom most DIMM slot with the middle header being filled by the nForce4 chipset cooler and the last header being at the bottom of the board, to the right of the last PCI slot. Placement is well thought out so as to keep the headers accessible. Three is adequate but I’m sure you would agree with me, four would have been better. BIOS Albatron has gone with the popular Phoenix BIOS for their K8SLI board that many of you are quite familiar with. Let's take a quick walk through and see what we have here.
Cutting things down to the nitty-gritty we're going to look mainly at the adjustments that are the crux of any enthusiast motherboard, memory and processor tweaks. Memory adjustments are full ranged to give you the ability to tap the most out of your DIMMs. Rather than just read off ranges, below are some screen shots of the memory BIOS screens.
Pg 1 - Introduction
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