Albatron KM18G Pro Mainboard

BIOS

I'm not going to waste much of your time here, mainly because the user manual for the motherboard is first rate! I want to emphasize that point, I don't know about you, but I've seen my share of poor user manuals and though some of us may be used to dealing with this, if you're a newb (and we've all been there) it can be frustrating not to have good info at hand. Well, Albatron has done themselves proud with this user manual. The thing is so good, I think even my wife could hook this puppy up and configure the BIOS. They really did an excellent job explaining the BIOS functions in addition to everything else. But for all you voyeurs out there, here's a couple of screenshots of the the BIOS.

   

As you can see, the BIOS is pretty standard. We've got the main BIOS screen and then we moved on to the Advanced chipset menu. Here, as in the Chaintech board, They have pre-loaded defaults for tweaking your system. Or you can choose the 'Expert' option and get your own hands dirty. For all testing purposes, we've decided to use the pre-loaded 'Turbo' settings on both boards.

Testing

Now we get to the fun part of the review... the testing. This is where we do our crash dummy impersonations and see what happens. Using our Chaintech nForce2 motherboard as a comparison we'll be running both boards through the following benchmarks and see what develops.

• Ziff Davis Business Winstone 2002

• Ziff Davis Content Creation 2003

• SiSandra 2003 Memory Benchmark

• Quake III

• [H]ard|OCP's UT 2003 bench program

This should give us a pretty good idea as to how this puppy works under pressure. And since we always have to make our cursory statement, now is as good a time as any. Not all hardware components will perform the same even under the best of conditions. The results that we get may, and probably will, differ from any that you would get under the same conditions.

Test System

• Albatron KM18G Pro / Chaintech 7NIF2

• Asus V9280/TD Ti4200

• 512MB Corsair PC3200

• Maxtor 20GB HDD

• Asus 52x CD-Rom

• AMD Athlon XP 2000+

• Windows XP Professional

Since both boards have onboard VGA we'll also be running the same tests using the onboard video systems as well as the Asus Ti4200 VGA.
 

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