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     K8X800 Pro ][ - Board Layout

     Albatron provides extensive documentation to assist the Do It Yourself system builder with all the instructions necessary to get the motherboard board installed quickly and correctly. The very busy motherboard design is a standard by-product when it has the rich feature set of the K8X800 Pro II.

     Getting up close and personal with the K8X800 Pro II reveals how crowded some of the board work will be getting things installed and configured. Don't let the set of Dual Inline Package (DIP) switches scare you, they are only used to configure what language the Voice Genie speaks in and which BIOS (Backup or Main) the system uses to boot from. The bottom edge of the board is tightly packed with the nearly all of the motherboards expanded feature connectors. The front panel complex header (Power/IDE LED and POWER/RESET buttons) Speaker header, Enclosure Intrusion Detector (Case open), three USB 2.0  and two Firewire IEEE-1394 headers. There is one distinct advantage to putting all of these connectors on the edge of the board -- they aren't position behind any PCI slots which would/could present problems when trying to utilize PCI slots. However, with all the functions that the K8X800 Pro II has onboard, I can't see anyone needing all six PCI slots.

     As if finding a place for the Front Panel Audio connectors wasn't hard enough, Albatron figured the best place for the floppy connector was underneath the bottom-most PCI slot. There are enough issues associated with larger cables (live drive cables - even if they are rounded) being stretched across a motherboard, that it doen't feel necessary to go into great depth about how this design could have been better. After all, aside from the occasional BIOS flash, Floppy drives are almost a thing of the past anyway, Right? And with the popularity of external card readers and other type of removable media, the BIOS can be set to use one of these devices as a BOOT DRIVE to perform BIOS flashes anyway, Right? So quite possibly this is just the Albatron way of putting the relic to rest.

     The motherboard is not littered with a wide assortment of Audio connectors. Instead, there is only the single CD-Audio input, the Front Panel and SP/DIF header blocks. In addition to utilizing your enclosures header-style front panel connecotrs, the K8X800 Pro II ships with an expansion port that will fit on the enclosures rear panel (loosing one PCI slot) and has connectors for front panel audio (headphones out, microphone in) and two sets of SP/DIF IN and OUT (one set of coaxial analog connectors and another set of digital fiber optic connectors)

A look at the included Accessory Audio Panel