Overclocking

Pulling this mainboard review back from VGA comparisons, it just wouldn't have been right to not put the screws to the Albatron K8SLI to see what sort of ceiling it had for overclocking.  We've seen some pretty high results with our AMD Athlon 64 3000+.  The specific chip used in this review, has hit 270MHz with the OEM cooler on other nForce4 boards.  So it hurt to see such a low speed limit imposed on us by the K8SLI.  241Mhz which translates into taking our 1800MHz Athlon 64 up to 2172MHz.  While not a bad overclock, I certainly expected much more.

Conclusion

Overall, its hard not to sing praises to the Albatron K8SLI mainboard.  A good solid spread of features priced less than the competition.  Its compact size is welcome as well as the smart cable connection points guaranteed to keep cable clutter to a minimum.  The digital detection of SLI instead of throwing a switch or jumper is also a very nice plus.  Stability was excellent and after having the board on the bench for well over a month we have yet to run into any glitches or problems. 

The con side of the K8SLI was short.  The bundle was small but as we said earlier, this really isn't a big deal.  No Firewire ports here but the bulk of us don't use Firewire.  The only real issue I had with the Albatron K8SLI was the lack of ceiling for overclocking.  Again, not the end of the world but the last does carry more sting than the other two combined.  Even so, I think you can see that Albatron does a nice balance job and gets it pretty close.  Good pricing and features make the Albatron K8SLI a worthy candidate for your next upgrade.

Update 9/10/2005 - We initially did not test out the RAID functions of this board only citing the manufacturers specs.  Since that time, we have had an absolute devil of a time getting drives set up in a RAID format to operate properly.  This experience was also dealt with from another hardware site who had been through several test boards with the same basic issue and no answer there yet either.  At present, we still haven't sorted this out yet - but it is noteworthy enough to give Joe User a heads up if a RAID set up is a guiding force in your purchase.

Pros:

• Rock solid stability

• Price

• Compact size and board layout

• SLI rocks

• Backup BIOS module

Cons:

• Small bundle

• Not a great overclocker

• No Firewire

BACK                    HOME

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