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It's not a secret that a serious competition reins the market of motherboards. Such situation is aggravated with global crisis of the whole IT industry. That is why an appearance of a new motherboard manufacturer looks at least strange. As you have probably guessed, I am talking about a Taiwanese company Albatron, which used to manufacture only TV-sets and monitors till recent time. Now Albatron has started diversification of its production (in other words it has started working on other segments of market). Motherboard and videocards appeared in stock.

Videocards manufacturing looks very simple. One just need to copy reference design, pack it into nice boxes with monsters painted on them and sell. But motherboards is much more serious and risky business. Here it is necessary to offer such set of possibilities, which can't be offered by competitors or to provide the best "cost-quality" ratio. It's interesting that Albatron's managers understand this situation that is why they tried to go by both ways. For example, on Computex exhibition the company announced a board i845E chipset with support of DDR400 memory (I will review this board at first opportunity, but I must note that operation with DDR400 memory is possible only when FSB is overclocked up to 150MHz). The use of unofficial properties of chipset is obvious. This product virtually doesn't have competitors (except Abit BD7-II board).
Albatron KX400+ represents motion along the second way. Although the board doesn't have any extraordinary possibilities, it costs rather cheap (comparable with Elitegroup and Acorp) and has some overclocking resources etc.

It's interesting to note that the company resembles Soltek eighteen months ago. Such company has to do first issues of boards with maximal quality. Manufacturers with reputation can allow themselves one or two mistakes, but this in unacceptable for a novice.

I remember the board Soltek SL-75KAV (on VIA KT133A chipset), which used to cost rather low but was a very good product. Even now this board can be used with new Athlon XP Thoroughbred processors. It is only necessary to update BIOS and find such processor on sale J.

Albatron KX400+ specifications

Box

Package

The box of original design has the following content:

· Motherboard;
· CD with software and drivers;
· Bracket with 2 extra USB ports;
· 2 ATA-100 cable, FDD cable;
· User manual in Englich + brief manual.

Box contents is standard: cables, driver CD, user manual and brief manual. Besides, there is a bracket with extra USB ports.

There are no claims to user manual: there is a rather detailed description of jumpers and connectors.
The CD contains drivers of onboard sound and PC-Cillin2002 besides standard VIA drivers (all files take 80Mb).

• Page1 - Specifications
• Page2 - Appearance
• Page3 - Overclocking and Stability
• Page4 - Benchmarks and Conclusions