Specs and features:



The K8 Ultra-U Pro board is powered by the lesser known ULi M1689 Chipset, it offers support for DDR1 and AGP, so it’s not a next generation chipset, it does however provide a very good solution for building a budget friendly motherboard with a large range of features (SATA/Ethernet/AC’97 sound)


from HTT Consortium website



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The full K8 Ultra-U Pro specs can be found here, the features which stand out are the two DDR DIMM slots (DDR400 PC3200), good for a total memory capacity up to 2 Gb. This means you can’t use any memory sticks larger then 1 Gb, but this is not different from most main boards nowadays. The AGP port is and 8x version, with a maximal bandwidth of 2.1 GB/s according to the box.

This chipset is also capable to offer us up to eight USB 2.0 ports. Four of them can be found directly on the rear I/O panel. The others can be used only if you connect separate USB ports to the USB connector on the mainboard (some cases have front-USB ports, this would be ideal), Albatron did not include an extra USB bracket, which limits your options a bit. Next to the default IDE facilities this chipset supports also two SATA connectors.

Albatron was so kind to send us the Ultra version of this series. What does this mean concretely? A 10/100 LAN port ! But that’s not everything. There is also 6 channel audio present. The chip used to control it is the Realtek ALC655.

You might have noticed it, there’s no firewire connection available. No drama, but now that high capacity MP3 players become more popular (Apple Ipod for example) as well as digital video cameras, this could have given a nice finishing touch on the board.

The design and especially the lay-out is quit important, more of his on the next page >>>