Page 5 - Pictorial #3

Here's my baby .. Dual BIOS. If you crash, flunk or do something very stupid to your BIOS the second one will take over and will allow you to flash that BIOS back into the broken one. It save's Albatron quite a few RMA's and the end user a lot of trouble. Every mainboard should have this at standard.

Remember I talked to you about the Northbridge ? Well, this is the southbridge, among them it's handling the sound, USB/FireWire, PCI and LAN. All the way to your right you can see the Serial ATA connectors. They are very close to the Southbridge which makes sense ... the Southbridge is controling it. And for high-speed optimal data integrity you want your data paths as short as possible. Clever .. to say at the least. 

On your right, six connectors for all your 8 channel sound. Of course you can de 8-channel sound over an optical SPDIF also. We'll show you that later on. Next to the sound connectors the luxurious 1 Gigabit/sec LAN, below it 2x USB 2.0 and then Parallel, Serial, Mouse and keyboard connectivity. You see, we have nothing to complain here.

I promised to show you that this mainboard can handle sound digital also. This bracket connects to your mainboard after which you'll have additional outputs, amiong them SPDIF optical and coaxal. Both in and outputs, cool stuff !

If you think you do not have enough connectors already you can use additional included brackets for FireWire, 4x USB, MIDI/Serial.

Oh and of course IDE/Floppy and Serial ATA cables are also included. Right I think we showed you enough images. Let's run some benchmarks. For this review I especially picked up a new Pentium 4 C class 2.8 GHz processor and Dual Channel DDR. Let's talk a little about Dual Channel DDR memory on the next page shall we ?