Albatron K8 Ultra-U Pro A64 S754 Motherboard Review

Motherboards/AMD S754 by piotke @ 2005-02-14

Albatron recently introduced a new S754 motherboard, based on the lesser known ULi chipset, it comes feature packed and offers some overclocking potential. Can this budget friendly board stand up to the competition? Read on to find out.

  • next

Introduction & In the box

Introduction & Tested Hardware:

The Albatron K8 Ultra-U Pro mainboard, as the name suggests, is designed for the Athlon 64 CPU series, socket 754 to be specific. Although it’s a rather budget minded board, Albatron did its best to pack the board with almost all the features present on higher end products from competing brands.

Albatron has been around for quite some time, its lower popularity in Europe (and Belgium, the rainy-day country) is caused by the low availability, which is set to change in the near future, with more hardware enthusiast minded and budget friendly products.

If you seek then you shall find, and I’ve had the pleasure of working with some Albatron products in the past, one of them, a Geforce 4 MX card, proved to be quite an overclocker, landing me a place in the TOP 10 at Futuremark’s ORB (Online ResultBrowser). So I’m very curious how this board will perform and overclock.

To give the Albatron K8 Ultra-U Pro some competition I bought an MSI K8M Neo-V, at first I was a bit skeptic about the integrated video but it can easily be disabled and performance of the board is identical to any run of the mill VIA KT800 based motherboard.

I paired both motherboards with an A64 3000+ (with the older 130nm Newcastle core, 512Kb lvl2 cache and running at 2Ghz), using the AMD Boxed cooling. A single stick of 512Mb PC3200 Mushkin LVLII V2 memory was also used, since the socket 754 in a single memory channel platform having more then 1 stick will not increase memory bandwidth.

“in the box”


Madshrimps (c) Madshrimps (c)
Click for bigger picture...


  • K8Ultra-U series mainboard
  • 2x IDE Cable 80 wire
  • FDC Cable
  • SATA Power Cord / SATA Cable
  • I/O Shield
  • Installation and Setup Driver CD
  • User Manual

    This is an average content, with everything you might need. Optional features are the Game Port Bracket, SPDIF & FRONT AUDIO Port Bracket and the USB brackets. Stuff most people don’t use, except for the USB brackets. Those would have come in handy.

    Let's take a look at what this board can offer the end user, a closer look at the specifications ->
    • next