Cooling

The chipset cooler is small but its noise is not annoying. I wonder if the fan cable will be as nicely tucked away as in our sample for the standard retail boards, it definitely looks very cleaned up.

Albatron Bios Security

A very handy feature Albatron has added to this board is ABS - Albatron Bios Security. In case your BIOS goes bad during an update, you plug in a small PCB with a BIOS chip on it, then you can boot your system and fix the corrupted flash. Unlike the DualBios from Gigabyte, you can actually write to the flash chip on the ABS card.


On the card you find a red jumper which allows selection of the active BIOS when the add-in card is installed.


The connector is keyed, so it's impossible to plug it in wrong.

While you can run the system with the ABS card installed at all times, I suggest you make sure you can boot with the card once, then remove the card and put it away. When you are not using the card, you should remove it, just in case something goes wrong with your board and it messes up both BIOSes.

Chips

Hardware monitoring is provided by a Winbond W83627THF.


For networking, Albatron chose a Vitesse CIS8201 LAN Controller to implement Gigabit Ethernet via NVIDIA's nForce4 chipset.


The Realtek ALC655 Audio Chip is responsible for sound.