MODTHEBOX.COM - Canada's Premier Case Modding Source - Reviews - Albatron KX18D Pro II Motherboard Review

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Slightly below the AGP slot resides the NVIDIA Media and Communications Processor Turbo (MCP-T) which was previously described. The Serial ATA RAID controller can be found towards the lower front portion of the board. The controller used is the Silicon Image Sil3112A chip, which supports disk striping RAID 0 and disk mirroring RAID 1 configurations. Two Serial ATA headers are located directly below the Silicon Image Sil3112A chip.

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The Media and Communications Processor Turbo (MCP-T) is located in the same general area as found on any other nForce 2 based motherboard. Absent on this particular motherboard is any form of passive cooling or optional mounting holes for the user to implement any DIY cooling. The Media and Communications Processor Turbo is responsible for IEEE 1394a/Firewire, USB 2.0, LAN, Ultra ATA 133 communication along with the integrated Audio Processing unit (APU) for real-time Dolby Digital 3D (AC3) encoding. Towards the very rear edge of the Albatron KX18D Pro II resides the Dual BIOS. The BIOS Mirror function allows you to create an original image of the default BIOS settings in case of failure or damage due to overclocking or improper BIOS flash upgrade.

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Moving towards the upper portion of the motherboard, there are two Ultra ATA33/66/100/133 IDE connectors and a single Floppy drive connector for a total of 4 IDE hard or optical drives. The Albatron KX18D Pro II can handle a maximum of 3GB of DDR 266/333/400 memory across three banks. Two of the three memory banks have been brightly colored in order to simplify installing your memory to run in dual channel configuration. With identical size and frequency modules placed into banks 1 and 3 or 2 and 3 will automatically activate the dual channel memory function.