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.

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Overclocking & testing

Test Setup:

As mentioned in the intro, I paired up the motherboards with overclocker friendly hardware, Mushkin's TCCD memory, Antec's 550W TrueControl PSU and one Albatron Geforce 4 MX480 AGP card which has run stable with AGP speeds up to 105Mhz in the past.

The test system was installed with Windows XP SP2, latest video card and system drivers, the BIOS which came shipped with the board was used during all tests to ensure an "out of the box" experience.

Piotke's Test Setup
CPU AMD Athlon 64 3000+
Mainboard
  • MSI K8M Neo-V
  • Albatron K8 Ultra-U Pro
  • Cooling Zalman CNPS7000B-Cu
    Memory 512 Mb PC 3200 Mushkin LII V2 TCCD
    PSU Antec True Control 550 watt



    Overclocking:

  • MSI K8M Neo-V


  • The MSI board is equipped with onboard VGA, but its performance is nothing to write home about, ~1500 in 3DMark2001SE, as good/bad as an old TNT2 Ultra, it's decent enough for everyday office applications, but you can forget about gaming.

    The MSI bios offers only a limited amount of tweaks, most notable was the lack of advanced memory timings or voltage options for the CPU, here's what the MSI offers the hardware enthusiast:

  • CPU Multiplier control
  • HTT Speed adjustment
  • Ram voltage (up to 2.85 Vddr)
  • Memory Cas Latency control
  • Memory / HTT divider (266/300/333/400)

    Using popular overclocking tools like A64 Tweaker and Clockgen I was able to lower memory timings to CL2 2-2-5 and increase the HTT speed easily, the end result however was a quite unstable system. The maximum HTT speed this board allowed through Clockgen in Windows was 240Mhz, but with the memory running async to keep things running stable. The board had cold boot issues when setting certain overclocks which proved stable in Windows, which became quite unnerving.

  • Albatron K8 Ultra-U Pro

    The BIOS of the K8 Ultra-U Pro has a few more options up its sleeve, a varied selection of voltages and memory timings control allowed me to tweak the system to its limit from within in the BIOS; CPU voltage can be increased to 1.7v vcore, DDR voltage up to 2.85v.

  • CPU Multiplier control
  • CPU voltage control (up to 1.7v)
  • HTT Speed adjustment
  • Ram voltage (up to 2.85 Vddr)
  • Full Memory Latency Control
  • Memory / HTT divider (266/300/333/400)

    The only pitfall of this board is the lack of an AGP/PCI lock, when you increase the HTT you also indirectly the speed of the aforementioned devices. The GF4 card can easily handle higher AGP speeds, but the hard disk used was negatively influenced by the increase PCI speed, resulting in data corruption. At first I got the system running at 260Mhz HTT and was quite impressed, however I needed to back the overclock down to 245Mhz before the system could pass benchmarking and stability tests. Although a 5mhz advantage over the MSI does not seem a lot, I have to point out that I did not the cold-boot issues with the Albatron, which puts this board in the lead, overclock-wise.

  • CPU Temperature

    When you start overclocking, it's a good idea to keep a close eye on the CPU temperature, both boards feature system health monitor tools, and allow you to shut the system down in case of overheating. The MSI board showed a CPU temp of 32°C from a cold boot, while the Albatron displayed only 24°C. With a room temp of ~20° the load temps were very closely matched, 62°C on the MSI, 59°C on the Albatron.


    Benchmarks:

    I ran a selection of benchmarks which rely heavily on the motherboard's performance:

  • 3DMark 2001SE
  • SuperPi
  • Sisoft Sandra Memory Benchmark
  • Quake 3 Arena Timedemo


    Results @ Stock speeds


    Madshrimps (c)
    Madshrimps (c)
    Madshrimps (c)
    Madshrimps (c)


    At stock speed the Albatron is a tad faster then the MSI, but this can be related to the slightly higher HTT speed of the Albatron which is not 200Mhz but 200.5Mhz at default settings.




    Results @ Overclocked speeds

    (note: The MSI's memory is running asynchronously to the HTT)


    Madshrimps (c)
    Madshrimps (c)
    Madshrimps (c)
    Madshrimps (c)


    Overclocked the Albatron is remarkably faster. The synchronous HTT & memory clock speed result in higher bandwidth giving a noticeable performance boost.

    Let's wrap things up ->
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