As you'd probably expect
from a budget board the bundle consists of pretty much the essentials.
Along with the driver installation CD comes a floppy and IDE
cable, poster sized quick instruction guide, a board layout
sticker for inside your case, the all important manual and a
four port USB2.0 bracket bringing the total to six.
Motherboard Bundle
Rather than bore you with every detail of the
KX400-8X's layout I'll let the supplied guide do the talking
for me. You can click on this to get a larger (and hopefully
readable) version.
Click For a Larger Image
Just to pick up on a few points, hopefully your
initial disdain over the inclusion of a rarely useful CNR slot
was eased when you realised that it comes in addition to six
regular PCI slots. As is often the case, the inclusion of six
rather than five PCI slots means you're going to need to unseat
your graphics card to add or remove memory as the retainers
will foul on the PCB.
The ATX power connector is nor particularly well
sited if your PSU is a little short on cable length, fortunately
in my case it's a simple task of breaking out a cable tie and
securing the leads out of harm's way well away from the CPU
cooling fan. In its defense though this board is rather small
by recent standards measuring in at just 220mm x 305mm.
You may also have noticed a couple of features
on the layout diagram that you may not be familiar with. The
first of these is the BIOS Mirror option. Normally associated
with Gigabyte boards BIOS mirror is simply a second BIOS chip
that can be used to boot the system should the original BIOS
become corrupt, possibly due to a failed flash or virus. It
also restores the initial BIOS chip to its original state so
making it bootable again. To avoid any problems with both chips
becoming defunct the second BIOS chip is read only.
KX400-8X Dual BIOS
The second feature that may need some explanation
is what Albatron call their "VoiceGenie" function.
This replaces the confusing series of POST beep error codes
with actual spoken prompts in any of four languages, English,
Chinese, Japanese and German. Don't expect too much, phrases
are fairly generic with announcements like "There may ne
a problem with your CPU" but for many people that makes
more sense than a series of beeps, even if 95% of the time the
problem will likely be linked to overclocking rather than an
actual problem with your CPU or AGP or what ever it claims is
at fault.
Fan headers on the motherboard are in short supply,
short supply meaning one in addition to the two reserved for
your CPU and North Bridge fan. I must say I was surprised to
see Albatron opt for active North Bridge cooling on a motherboard
at this price range, particularly with so many other vendors
taking the passive cooling route. There's certainly no evidence
that active cooling aids with overclocking this chipset but
I'd sooner see it there than not.
3 Phase Power
Socket clearance is actually pretty good for a
board of these dimensions and Albatron have courteously omitted
a capacitor where you need to get your finger in to locate the
heat sink retaining clip on the socket lug/s. What I don't like
is this sudden craze for rotating the socket so its lugs are
along the board's edge as it can make fitting a heatsink a real
challenge when the side of the board is close to the bottom
of the power supply. As an example, Cooler Master heat sinks
with their incredible easy to use long lever action are unusable
on my system with this type of socket arrangement, there simply
isn't room to operate the lever. Also out is the Thermalright
SLK-800 and no doubt many of the other Thermalright coolers
as they require more of an acute angle on the screwdriver than
can be attained in the available space.
Socket Clearance
Nothing very exciting on the connector front.
The KX400-8X is very much legacy based and with no networking
options it leaves the basic PS/2 ports, COM ports, printer port,
twin USB2.0/1.1 ports, MIDI/Gameport and audio jacks.
