Albatron K8SLI Motherboard Review

Introduction

K8SLI from Albatron is a socket 939 motherboard (i.e., targeted to Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX, Athlon 64 X2 and Opteron CPUs), based on NVIDIA nForce4 SLI chipset. Its main advantage is its price, lower than other SLI-based socket 939 motherboards available on the market. Does lower price mean lower quality and lower performance? We will check this out on our review.

Figure 1: Albatron K8SLI Rev 1.1 motherboard.

K8SLI appearance is very simple and follows the same design used by other boards manufactured by Albatron. What immediately caught our attention was its size. It is extremely compact for a SLI motherboard, thus not requiring big cases. On the other hand, its size can prevent the installation of bigger CPU coolers.

Another criticism regarding its layout is to the position of its black SATA ports. With two video cards installed it is almost impossible to use these ports.

Figure 2: nForce4 SLI active heatsink.

The manufacturing quality of this board is very good and all its main capacitors are from Japanese Chemi-con.

No special procedure is required to activate SLI mode on K8SLI. Just connect two compatible video cards and the SLI mode will be activated. It is also not necessary to connect any extra power supply cable when SLI mode is used, but we recommend you to use a good quality power supply with at least true 450 watts.

Figure 3: PCI Express slots.

K8SLI has four DDR-DIMM sockets, supporting up to 4 GB RAM DDR266/333/400. Albatron used purple color on sockets 1 and 2 and green color on sockets 3 and 4. To use DDR Dual Channel mode just install each module on sockets with the same color.