![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Tuesday , October 11, 2005
- Author:
- Morry Teitelman
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Albatron K8SLI
Are you looking for a small, no-nonsense, and inexpensive SLI motherboard? If so, you might want to consider the K8SLI, which is Albatron’s entry into the nForce4 SLI arena. How well does Albatron's board stack up against the competition from ABIT, MSI, and ECS?
BIOS
Albatron chose to base the K8SLI’s bios on a Phoenix AwardBIOS type design. The BIOS used in testing and illustrated below is version 1.12.
The Advanced tab contains a series of submenus for configuring chipset and bus related settings, including memory, voltage, and bus speed related settings, as well as options for configuring the system device boot order. With a USB 2.0 type hard drive device connected and detected at system startup, the drive shows as a viable device in the Hard Disk Boot Priority submenu. The priority of specific items in this menu can be changed using either the + and – keys or the PAGE UP and PAGE DOWN keys.
The Advanced Chipset Features submenu contains BIOS cache related settings as well as a submenu containing all BIOS memory configuration settings named DRAM Configuration.
When the Timing Mode option is set to Manual, all memory timing options become user accessible. The speed of the installed memory is set via the Memclock index value (MHz) option, using pre-configured ratios based on the default 200MHz CPU FSB. The settings available correspond to the following ratios, with the ratios listed as DDR FSB:CPU FSB: 100MHz is 1:2; 133MHz is 2:3; 166MHz is 5:6; and 200MHz is 1:1. The BIOS includes the following configurable memory timing options: CAS latency; active to precharge delay (shown as Min RAS# Active Time); RAS to CAS delay; RAS precharge delay (shown as Row precharge Time (Trp)); and command rate (shown as 1T/2T Memory Timing). Note that on the memory timings listed, the numerically lower setting forces more aggressive memory operation.
The PnP/PCI Configuration submenu contains various options used to configure the operation of the board PnP and PCI devices. While the BIOS does not contain options to manually set the IRQ on specific devices, you can modify the pool assignments through the IRQ Resources submenu. This submenu becomes available with the Resources Controlled By option set to Manual.
The Frequency/Voltage Control submenu contains most available options for configuring board bus speed settings and voltage settings. The only speed settings that are located in a different location are the memory speed settings described earlier.
The CPU FSB is defined using the CPU Host Frequency (MHz) option, which allows for a maximum FSB of 450MHz. The selected FSB speed affects not only the physical CPU speed, but also the HyperTransport bus speed and the memory speed. The CPU multiplier setting is controlled via the Hammer Fid control option. The multipliers available to you are CPU dependent, with multipliers ranging from 4x to 25x. The CPU speed itself is determined by multiplying the CPU HOST Frequency (MHz) setting with the Hammer Fid control setting. The HT Ratio option sets the base HyperTransport bus speed using a series of ratios. The bus speed can be found by multiplying the selected ratio by the currently selected CPU FSB. The speed of the PCI-Express bus can be set asynchronously from the CPU FSB using the PCIE Clock option. This setting allows for a maximum PCI-Express bus speed of 145MHz.
The board-supplied voltage to the CPU is defined by the CPU Voltage (Volt) option as a series of plus voltage percentages. The option allows for up to a 15% over volt of the CPU. The DDR Voltage (Volt) option controls the amount of power supplied to the installed memory modules, with a more than sufficient 3.00V possible. The nForce4 chipset voltage is controlled through the Chipset Voltage (Volt) option, with an available maximum of 1.8V.
The Peripherals tab contains submenus for configuring the numerous integrated onboard devices. The IDE Function Setup submenu contains all available IDE and SATA configuration options, including a submenu devoted to the NVIDIA RAID controller. The RAID Config submenu contains options for configuring the RAID controller, with the ability to set any drive port to use RAID individually, including both the master and slave devices associated with the IDE1 and IDE2 ports. The Onboard Device submenu contains settings pertaining to the USB 2.0 ports, the integrated audio device, and the onboard NVIDIA LAN controller.
The HW Monitor tab contains real-time statistics on board monitored temperatures, voltages, and fan speeds. Notice that there are no advanced configuration options available in this section.