"Tasters' choice" award for these chips!
Written: Jan 15 '04 (Updated Jan 15 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Stability and compatibility, wealth of features, price, excellent retail package, outstanding tech support.
Cons: 6-channel audio shares the same jacks as line-in and microphone.
The Bottom Line: I am extremely satisfied with the product and the company, and enthusiastically recommend them.
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| towwang's Full Review: Albatron KX400+ PRO Motherboard |
[Picking the right potato...]
In the past year I have built two PCs component by component, all based on this motherboard, and the results have been very satisfying. To me, choosing the right motherboard entailed choosing the right chipset first, and I had looked into three competing chipsets:
1) ALi Aladdin, which I tried but found incompatible with the DDR memory I already had.
2) SiS 735, a good chipset but found only in low-priced motherboards that did not have good features.
3) VIA KT333, which was the one I finally chose, as it had USB 2.0 (more about this below) and ATA-133.
All of the above 3 chipsets could be found on motherboards costing less than $75 by mail order in the fall of 2002, but the KT333 was the only one that supported a maximum front-side bus (FSB) speed of 166 MHz, which in turn supports 333 DDR memory. Faster FSB means faster memory throughput, which is particularly important for squeezing performance out of Athlon XP processors.
[Potato named VIA makes various chips...]
The KT333 name itself designates only the "north bridge" chip, which connects and communicates the CPU with memory, the AGP slot, and the "south bridge" chip, which in my opinion determines what extra features will exist in each particular motherboard. At the time, VIA had designed two south bridges to go with the KT333: the VT8233A and the VT8235. The former supported only USB 1.1 ports, while the latter supported the much faster USB 2.0 ports.
[Chose the chips, now let's see what salsa came with it]
After weeding out some motherboards with the less capable south bridge, I was surprised to find that Albatron chose the better south bridge for the "KX400+ Pro" at the $75 price point. That was the end of my decision process; I promptly picked up a retail box that contained:
1) The motherboard itself
2) Manual with addendum for overclocking
3) Two IDE cables
4) Floppy disk drive cable
5) Bracket with 4 (female) USB 2.0 ports. Note: two other USB ports are soldered on the motherboard, facing the rear panel of your computer case.
6) CD with drivers for the KT333 chipset, USB 2.0 and ALC650 audio codec, supporting Windows 4.1 and above, and Windows NT 5.0 and above.
7) ATX backplate (a rectangular piece of metal that attaches to your computer case, with holes through which the PS/2, USB, serial and parallel ports peek out)
The quality of the manual is good (4 out of 5 stars). I spotted only 2-3 minor grammar errors, and all diagrams are up to date and complete. The information is very technical, so you do need to know how to build a PC if you buy this product.
The manufacturer has additional information at
http://www.albatron.com.tw/english/it/mb/specification.asp?pro_id=31
(this URL may change any time).
[Impressions from the first bite]
The most impressive features of the KX400+ Pro have been:
1) Plenty of features embedded: ALC650 6-channel audio codec on the board, connectors for 6 USB ports, and 6 PCI slots in addition to the AGP 4x and CNR slots. At 6+6+6, this thing is quite a beast!
2) A "Voice Genie" chip. It sends digitized speech to the case speaker and the audio line-out connector, whenever the BIOS encounters a problem at system start-up. Basically it speaks the sentence "Your XYZ may have a problem", where XYZ can be AGP, PCI, floppy, etc. It is very helpful at troubleshooting loose connections for example. Note: this feature seems to have been removed from the revision C board.
3) BIOS mirror. The EEPROM contains two copies of your system BIOS. If in the middle of updating your BIOS something goes wrong, you still have a good copy to boot up your system with.
4) FSB overclocking. You can adjust the front-side bus speed in 1 MHz increments, so you over-clock your CPU, memory and AGP device simultaneously.
The BIOS also lets you choose a FSB multiplier for your CPU, but this on the other hand has no effect unless you physically unlock the multiplier of your Athlon XP chip. This will be an exercise in hand-stability I won't undertake until my CPU chip devaluates to the price of a bag of edible chips.
5) Three year warranty. I absolutely do not expect any modern motherboard to fail within that time frame, but this warranty length is a significant show of confidence from the manufacturer. Many other brands offer only a 1-year warranty by comparison.
[A few soggy bits...]
These are some minor deficiencies I found in the product:
1) The "line-in" input jack also serves as a "surround left and right" output jack, and the "microphone" input jack also serves as "center and bass" output jack when you want to use 6 channel audio. Whether each jack by itself is in input or output mode can be selected by software. If you want to use all these inputs and outputs simultaneously, you MUST buy a case or drive bay panel with additional audio jacks, and connect those case jacks to a separate connector on the motherboard. (Then the jacks soldered on the KX400+ Pro can be left as outputs on a more permanent basis.)
2) The "audio rack" software for Win32 included with the RealTek driver for the ALC650 chip is an utter piece of garbage. If you use it to play a video clip, there is no way to resize the TINY video window. The user interface is not intuitive; there are no pop-up descriptions for the tiny controls on that applet's window. Worse, there is no way to avoid installing this program; it latches onto the driver installation process.
3) The "400" in the product name is misleading. The "KX400+ Pro" is not capable of attaining 400 DDR (200 MHz FSB) speeds, unless you over-clock it to completely unrealistic settings. Furthermore, I need to stress to the public: it is not correct to say "333 MHz DDR"; it is really "166 MHz" giving a "double data rate of 333 million cycles per second", or "333 DDR" in short.
[The lingering sweet after-taste]
Both motherboards I bought have been in daily use for over a year, and I have frequently stressed the systems to 99% CPU usage under Windows NT. System stability has been nothing less than rock-steady, and performance is completely in-line with benchmark results published at most hardware-review web sites.
I did have to update the system BIOS once, because the version that came pre-flashed had a strange problem: it could not measure the speed of my case fan, which rotates at 2600 RPM. Upgrading the BIOS fixed this, and added support for AMD processors using the newer Barton core (up to Athlon XP 3000+ as of this writing).
Also I had a very positive experience with Albatron's technical support. They accurately my e-mail questions within a few business hours; one response came from the Taiwan headquarters, another from the U.S. site, both within 5 business hours of my initial query.
Overall, I am extremely satisfied with the product and the company. Motherboards and CPUs devaluate faster than Enron stock, but at the point in time when the chips were released, the KX400+ Pro deserved a "taster's choice" award among similar competing products.
[Best before...]
2003 January 15, initial revision by Tow Wang.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 75
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Epinions.com ID:
towwang
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Member: Tow Wang
Location: California; U.S.A.
Reviews written: 45
Trusted by: 8 members
About Me:
Rabidly passionate about computers and electronics!
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