Closer Look: Albatron KM18G Pro

The board is designed in uATX form-factor as it’s positioned for inexpensive compact systems. Such systems usually do not house a lot of PCI cards and they are not selected for overclocking purposes. In other respects, this board has a lot in common with its larger siblings. The only thing it lacks is SerialATA, but SerialATA hard drives are not budget solutions at all.

Albatron offers the KM18G in two versions: Pro and Pro II. The latter is more functional thanks to a different South Bridge - MCP-T that supports FireWire and SoundStorm technology mentioned above. I’ve got the less functional model, but you know the difference.

Specification of the Albatron KM18G Pro look as follows:

Although the integrated nForce2 IGP graphics core supports nView, Albatron considers that one VGA connector is enough for a uATX board. By the way, Shuttle has an opposite point of view and lays out two VGA connectors on the MN31N boards. It is difficult to say which approach is more reasonable: on the one hand, a budget system will be hardly used with two monitors; on the other hand, there are not many devices with a COM port either (maybe just external modems), though Albatron mainboard has this port instead of the second VGA.

The board has not many accessories with it, but it’s typical of Albatron. So, it comes with a CD-disk with drivers, FDD and ATA/100 cables and a bracket with two USB ports. There are no panels with other ports because the connectors configuration is pretty standard. Other things are actually not so vitally important and would only increase the product cost.

Features of such board entirely depend on the South Bridge because there are no other controllers there. That is why it supports two Parallel IDE channels without RAID (RAID is not a standard solution in a low-cost system intended especially for home use), and six USB 2.0 ports. A pair of USB 2.0 ports is located on the board’s rear panel, the other pair - on a separate bracket included into the package, and the third pair should be connected to USB ports of the PC case, as Albatron’s engineers and marketing people see it. If you don’t like this idea, you can get one more bracket with USB ports.

Sound on the KM18G Pro is implemented via the popular Realtek ALC650codec. The sound quality it provides has been discussed all over the Net. Anyway, it is more than enough for me, though I’m not a passionate music fan, as I have already said.