CeBIT 2002 Part 2 - CPUs, Cooling, Motherboards, & Video

A new motherboard manufacturer: Albatron

Albatron's CEO worked for Gigabyte before, and upon leaving he took several employees with him. So, even though Albatron is new in the motherboard market, they have an experienced staff. Their primary target is the market of system integrators. Albatron's boards are made in Taiwan.

Interesting detail: Albatron's motherboards feature a dual BIOS called "TwinBIOS", which obviously reminds us of Gigabyte's Dual BIOS feature - certainly not a coincidence.

Albatron presented a very complete range of motherboards, with chipsets from Intel, VIA, nVidia, SIS, as well as GeForce MX-based graphics cards.

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This is Albatron's KT333 solution. Reading of the CPU temperature through the internal diode is currently under testing; it remains to be seen whether it will work in the final version. One inductor is a little close to the upper left edge of the CPU socket, which probably makes the motherboard incompatible with large heatsinks like the Alpha PAL8045.

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This is Albatron's nForce motherboard - it was not displayed to the public, but shown only in the back room of the booth. This is not the final version; the shipping version will undergo a redesign as this is basically a clone of NVIDIA's reference board.

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This is Albatron's Intel 845-based board with integrated graphics (845G). A version without onboard graphics is also available; it looks pretty much identical, so we're not posting another picture here.

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Here's Albatron's P4 motherboard using the SIS 651 chipset.