Physical Examination
Albatron did a good job with the physical design of the board and there weren’t any serious shortcomings to contend with.
The socket area is well laid out with capacitors placed farther away from the socket than most other manufacturers (most who place their components right up against the retention clip). You should not have any problems installing a larger heatsinks.
Plenty of clearance around the socket.
Near the socket is the Northbridge with a passive copper heatsink which gives superior hear conductivity. Albatron uses a thermal pad for an interface between the Northbridge and the cooler. You may to want to replace this with thermal paste as the thermal pad only makes contact along the edges of the chip.
The copper Northbridge cooler is a nice touch. The thermal pad, however, makes
poor contact and should be replaced if doing serious overclocking.
The AGP slot uses a slide latch instead of the typical lever style latch. So to lock the card after installing, you have to move the slide to the lock position manually. This has the benefit in that you can remove/install your AGP card easily since you don’t have to lock your card in place. On the other hand, you may forget to lock the card when transporting which may cause problems if your card bounces free.
The BIOS area of the board features the dual BIOS chips and the switches to use it. The manual documents how to use the switches to back-up, reset, and restore a BIOS image.
The floppy connector is located in an awkward spot along the bottom edge of the motherboard. Many of you don’t use floppies anymore, but if you do you may need get a longer cable depending on where your drive is located.
For those of you interested, there are three fan headers on the motherboard none of which are controllable by software.
Because the digital audio connections are on a separate riser, the back panel for the K8X800 ProII is pretty basic: PS2, serial and parallel ports, gigabit LAN, two USB (compare to four found on most other boards), and your analog audio connections for the Envy24.
