Now talking about its storage capacity, it has two ATA-133 ports and four Serial ATA II ports controlled by nForce4 SLI chipset. These ports support NCQ (Native Command Queuing) and nVidia RAID feature, which allows the use of up to eight hard disk drives (four Serial ATA and four ATA-133) under RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 or JBOD. K8SLI comes with only one Serial ATA cable and a Serial ATA power adaptor.
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Figure 4: Four Serial ATA-300 ports.
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Figure 5: Cables and accessories.
On its networking side, K8SLI has “only” one on-board LAN port. We say “only” because the majority of competing motherboards have two on-board LAN ports. The LAN port from K8SLI is Gigabit Ethernet (1,000 Mbps) controlled by nForce4 SLI chipset supporting hardware-base firewall by nVidia and needing only one small chip for making the physical layer interface (in the case of this motherboard Vitesse VSC8201RX was used).
Albatron K8SLI has a six-channel on-board audio, produced by the chipset using Realtek ALC655 codec, which has a signal-to-noise ration of 90 dB and a coaxial SPDIF output soldered on the motherboard.
This motherboard also brings eight USB 2.0 ports (four soldered on the back part of the motherboard and four available thru I/O brackets, which don’t come with the motherboard).
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Figure 6: K8SLI back panel.
A very interesting feature available on this board is called ABS (Albatron BIOS Security), which is a small card containing an extra BIOS, to be used to recover the original BIOS if the motherboard doesn’t turn on anymore because of a wrong BIOS update procedure or because of a CIH/Chernobyl-like virus attack.
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Figure 7: Albatron Bios Security.
