The Board

It's now time to move along to the board. Albatron has always favoured the blue PCB for its boards, just like GIGABYTE and they are almost identical coloured PCBs, though Albatron's looks a little darker in colour. Being Mini-ITX by design, it's extremely cramped and the CPU socket takes up a lot of the space. There is a 24-pin power connector and a 4-pin Aux power connector along the right hand edges of the board which is the bulk of the cables. The IDE port sits directly behind the 24-pin power connector.

At the top of the board Albatron has gone with SO-DIMM memory to save as much space as possible. This gives the board dual channel support, though, thanks to two SO-DIMMS giving a grand total of 4GB of supported memory; more than enough for any setup. The CPU is fed its voltage through a 3 phase voltage system which is more than enough power to feed even the Black Edition Phenom X4's.

Albatron hasn't skimped on the rear I/O ports. The biggest loss is the PS/2 mouse port; there is only a keyboard port with two USB ports below it. A DVI and CRT port allow for dual display video along with a HDMI port, so it's ready for HDTV thanks to the AMD 780G's IGP powering the show. HD Audio is supported through 7.1 channels by the rear I/O or through the HDMI port. In all, it's a great array of ports on offer.

Lastly it's to the expansion system and this is extremely easy. There is only one slot and it's a PCIe x16 one physically, but only runs at x4 speed. This is a real mystery as the 780G Northbridge supports a x16 lane, so why it wasn't used, we aren't sure.