Date: June 2nd, 2003
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner, Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product was donated by: Albatron

PRODUCT PICTORIAL & FEATURES

If you are going to be buying a motherboard, you don't want to just read about it, we want to SEE it right. Well, here we go...

This motherboard as stated in the specifications support the 478 pin Pentium 4 CPU from 400Mhz all the way to the 800 FSB. Although, it's support for the 800Mhz FSB comes through overclocking and not native support. More will be stated on this matter in the BIOS section.

The motherboard is natively capable of DDR333 (PC2700), but through overclocking as you will see later on, it will handle itself nicely at even DDR433 (PC3500) memory settings. One problem I had to note with this board is the unfortunate fact that you will have to remove your AGP videocard to remove and/or replace your memory. Not a huge deal if you don't swap components in and out for upgrading or testing all the time, but it can become tiresome.

What helps it reach these overclocks and higher memory timings stable?

For one, the northbridge has active cooling with this rather large heatsink fan combo. But wait, there's more...

Not only is it actively cooled, it's actively cooled by copper. Better cooling on the northbridge means a better overclock. With this board, if the overclock fails, you know it's a CPU and/or memory problem. The fan attached pushes a decent amount of air and is quiet, but, even I didn't know for a while that it is actually an LED fan that blinks blue, red and green in different configurations. A very nice bonus feature if you have a windowed case.