Albatron K8SLI Mainboard

The other main area of the Albatron's BIOS we are going to look at is the Frequency/Voltage control screens.  As you can see below, the CPU host frequency gives you a 200 to 450MHz range to play with.  Don't bank on getting your processor too far out of the shallow end here.  PCI-Express frequencies are also open to adjustment as you see fit or hardware can handle. 

        

The processor, memory and chipset voltage are adjustable here too.  The processor voltage is limited to ratios; a 5%, 10% or 15% bump allowed only.  Memory and chipset voltage is set in standard units with a nice spread available for each.

     

Performance

Any benchmark you see on a system has to be accepted in the context it is presented in.  No two systems are the same and results can vary widely depending on what components you have running in your rig.  To this end, we are going to use our Chaintech Zenith VNF4 Ultra K8 board as a comparison product to give you perspective on the results we obtain.  I do want to point out that even though the VNF4 Ultra is the closest competitor we have in the same class as the K8SLI in house right now, the VNF4 Ultra is based on the nForce4 Ultra chipset whereas the Albatron is based around the standard nForce4.

To help gauge the Albatron's performance we have put together a small suite of benchmarks to include PC Magazine's Business Winstone 2004, PC Magazine's Content Creation 2004, SiSoft Sandra 2005 Pro's Memory Bandwidth Benchmark, Half Life 2, Doom 3 and Far Cry.  No results or figures are any good if taken out of context.  All our figures are the result of five runs per benchmark per product.  Out of these five, the highest and lowest scores are thrown out with the remaining three averaged and graphed as follows.

Test Bed

• AMD Athlon 64 3000+

• OEM Cooler

• Albatron GeForce 6600GT

• (2) 512 mb DIMM of Corsair XMS4400 DDR

• Maxtor 80gb SATA HDD

• Generic DVD-RW drive

• Ultra X-Connect 500w PSU

• Windows XP Pro with all service packs installed

In case you think we forgot, after our standard run of benchmarks, we are going to drop in a second Albatron GeForce 6600 GT and compare the performance differences with a single 6600 GT as well as with ATi's current flagship, the Radeon X850XT.  Let's have at it.

BACK                    NEXT

Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - The Board
Pg 3 - More Board / BIOS
Pg 4 - BIOS / Test Setup
Pg 5 - Productivity Benchmarks
Pg 6 - Gaming Benchmarks
Pg 7 - SLI in action
Pg 8 - Overclocking / Conclusion