Page 3
Albatron's mainboard comes with a heap of extra NVIDIA functionality.
MediaShield
NVIDIA invested a lot of time and money in resources for something that 99% of users will never use. I personally love using RAID, but here in Groningen I'm likely also the only one using it. It's called MediaShield and it basically is a nice palette of hard- and software innovations to simplify RAID configurations.
Native Command Queuing, SATA-II that in theory offers you twice as much bandwidth (300MB/s wahooo... ), RAID wise we see support for RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1, JBOD, cross controller RAID, spare disk allocation and bootable RAID 5. Another cool technology is the new Disk Alert System.
Disk Alert System, say you have like 4 hard drives active on the NVIDIA controller and fails/shuts down/dies/whatever, DAS will allert you as to which SATA port the drive is connected to, making this a superb trait for servers and their administrators.
Active Armor
Also included in the NVIDIA nForce 4 is Active Armor, which I personally like as you can't be too safe these days against trojans, viruses and hackers. Active Armor looks like a nice piece of software running in Windows, yet it's a hardware firewall built into the core logic of the NVIDIA nForce chipset. This makes it less stringent on your processor.
Overclocking - Dr. Speed
In addition to these pure NVIDIA function, Albatron also will give you a piece of software called Dr. Speed Software, it's Albatron's version of nTune, which you can use to overclock and monitor the mainboard real-time from the GUI (Windows). That's right, dynamic overclocking.
With "Easy" Mode you can get a peek at VCore, CPU Temperature, CPU Fan speed and change the FSB Frequency but once you select "Advanced" you can select from several panels. The first is overclocking, followed by hardware monitoring and a general information page.
By lowering our CPU multiplier and increasing the FSB we got up to a 225 MHz FSB. Anything higher and the motherboard refused to POST. Then Albatron's Watch Dog Timer will activate itself and reset the BIOS options to default.
We of course are mainly restricted by our air cooled AMD64 FX-57 CPU. Dr. Speed is a nice piece of software although I'm not sure if I prefer is over NVIDIA's standard nTune, which refused to work overclocking and monitoring wise with this mainboard.
The Bundle
Included with the K8SLI you'll find a motherboard manual, Driver CD, Quick Install Guide, two Ultra/133 IDE cables, Floppy Cable, Serial ATA cable, Molex to Serial ATA power cable, SLI Bridge, I/O Shield. Pretty much everything you need to get started. Yet it's a little on the slim side, only one Serial ATA cable, no USB bracket. But hey .. this is all done to keep the cost of the mainboard down.
