This is another ULi M1689 based mainboard for the AMD Socket 754 CPUs. In the past, we have seen the various models based on this chipset and found that the performance does not differ very much from one another. As the FSB runs at a default of 200.5MHz, you would notice that it is slightly speedier compared to other boards based on the same chipset.

In the BIOS, there are also options of ASync 166,133,100 operation.  HTT freq can be set to 1GHz, 800MHz , 600Mhz, 400 MHz. As it is a single chipset with no north south pairs to talk to, this reduces the latency and would provide a swifter computing experience. Chipset is generally cooler because it has only the functions of the chipset compared to the NF3.

Albatron K8Ultra-U Pro offers pretty good overclocking features including voltage adjustments (vagp, vdimm, vcore), fsb, multiplier, pci fix option in the BIOS. In our tests, the board and it seems to hit the wall at 225MHz (max FSB 333MHz) no matter what I do. That includes setting HTT to 600MHz, PCI to 33. It seems that AGP is running at a fraction of the FSB (225/3=75). This is when I lower the multiplier to 8 and increasing the FSB to beyond 220. As you know most DDR400 would need 2.7v to run steadily at aggressive timings, (CAS 2, 5-2-2), this board offers up to 2.85v for VDIMM which allows it to run well. (see gallery on page 3,4 for BIOS screen shots).

Installation is easy with colour coded front panel connectors. The manual is also concise and easy to understand. In terms of features, this board supports up to 8 USB 2.0 ports (4 at the back, 4 via extensions), 6 ch audio thru Realtek ALC655 codec. It also comes with SATA ports which can be used to form a RAID 0, 1 array.

Overall, a good price/performance board for the AMD fans.

Suggested Retail Price

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Pros

• 8 X USB 2.0 
• Single chipset
• Overclocking features
• Chipset runs cool

Cons

• No IDE RAID
• No 1394

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.