The Albatron KM18G PRO is a cheap and cheerful Micro ATX board, of the sort you might expect to find in an OEM system. It comes in a small shiny silver and green box, with a bare minimum of accessories. Its not yet on sale in the UK, but when it is, expect it to be fairly cheap.

Specification and Features

nForce 2 MCP chipset
Micro ATX format
AGP 8x
Dual DDR 266/333/400 support
Onboard LAN
4 USB 2.0 ports
Integrated Geforce 4mx graphics
Onboard 6 channel audio

Layout and aesthetics

This being a Micro ATX board, there are only three PCI slots, and one AGP. The colour scheme is non standard, with a blue AGP slot, purple and lime green dimm slots, on a dark blue board. Personally I think it is time someone set a colour standard for dual DDR slots. Whilst the sound of purple, blue and lime green might be off-putting to those of you who like to show off the guts of your computers, it doesn't actually look too bad once you install everything into the board. The silver Northbridge sink with a clear fan looks rather nice but the two lime green dimm slots spoil the effect a little. The CPU socket area is fairly clear. I had no trouble fitting an AX7, but this was due to it tapering at the base, another 80mm sink might not be so lucky and fall foul of a single badly placed capacitor. The extra USB headers and the like are sensibly placed on the bottom edge of the board. There are 3 fan headers, all in good positions, with one chassis fan header at the bottom right hand corner, and a proper 3 pin connector for the Northbridge fan, and a CPU fan header right at the top close to the socket. The three things that spoil it are firstly the dimm slots are too close to the AGP slot, a radeon 8500 prevented the first dimm being removed. The ATX connector is right on the wrong side of the CPU socket, causing the cable to cross the socket at 45 degrees. This proved to be a bit of a problem with my test PSUs short lead, and took a bit of persuasion to keep the ATX cable out of my CPU fan. The last problem is the most annoying, the connector for CD audio in is positioned right by the AGP slot, where it gets in the way of the TV out connector on my Geforce 4mx420 card. This not only prevented me from screwing the card down securely, it made using the CD audio in connector impossible with most graphics cards I tried.

Usability

The manual is a thick booklet in only 2 languages, so there are 47 pages of English to read. The hardware side is well covered, with plenty of information. The BIOS is not explained in quite as much detail, but it is still fairly thorough with explanations of most things. Apart from one baffling option, called "CPU interface" which is described as "this item allows you to set the CPU/FSB parameters". You might think this is an option for changing the multipliers, but no, there are only 2 options, "optimal" and "aggressive". I have no idea what it means or does, all I know is changing it makes things crash. The memory speed options are not that intuitive either, who would have known setting the memory to run synchronously would require you to set the DDR/CPU ratio to "2.00"? The driver CD is not quite ideal, the autorun menu doesn't have an option to install drivers, instead you have to trawl through the CD yourself looking for the appropriate setup file, but once you have found it, it installs everything for you quite happily. The physical installation of the board is simple enough, there is a sliding clip on the AGP slot to hold cards in place, and it does the job very well too. The front panel connectors are marked on the board fairly clearly, and I didn't have to go rooting though the manual to find where to put the power switch. Strangely, the board didn't recognize my CPU properly, and initially booted it up with a 100mhz FSB. The manual mentions that you have to set the FSB manually, but it is rather unusual nowadays to have to do that.

Performance and Overclocking

As the benchmarks show, the performance of the onboard geforce4mx is dismal, and is not a suitable for gaming at all. When it is enabled, it leeches off about 300MB/s of memory bandwidth to run the graphics. This figure could be higher infact, as the screen juddered and lost synch while running the bandwidth benchmarks. Performance with a graphics card installed is more or less the same as all the other nForce 2 boards, the main difference being the boards inability to run fast timings. I am using kingmax ram, capable of CAS2, but the Albatron will only run it at cas2 with a 100mhz FSB. At 133 and 166, the BIOS sets the ram to cas2.5, and then raises it to cas3 for DDR400. The figures however, show the same pattern all the other boards did. Dual DDR is useless, and asynchronous memory doesn't have any benefits either. This board is not designed for overclockers, there are no BIOS options for multiplier or core voltage. It does have MHz by MHz FSB adjustment from 100Mhz to 200Mhz, but this is of little value with no multiplier or voltage options. I think this is rather a pity, as the board has room for a good heatsink, and a well cooled Northbridge.

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