The layout

A motherboard without a garish PCB color!

The KT400+ Pro isn't laden with integrated peripherals, so its layout is clean and uncluttered. It's a little surprising that Albatron has gone with a boring PCB color on the KT400+ Pro, especially since their GeForce4 Ti 4200 graphics card comes on a blue PCB—not that PCB color matters.

Plenty of room for a GeForce4 Ti 4600 to stretch out

Albatron adheres to the AGP 2.0 spec, which means that there's plenty of room for long GeForce4 Ti 4600 graphics cards to extend beyond the AGP slot. There are a few capacitors in the vicinity, and the DIMM slots are very close, but my VisionTek GeForce4 Ti 4600 slides in nice and smooth.

That annoying DIMM tab thing

The DIMM slots are awfully close to the AGP slot, so close that one has to to remove the graphics card to flip the DIMM tabs open. Having to remove your graphics card every time you want to swap DIMMs is a pain, but it's a necessary evil given the KT400+ Pro's inclusion of six PCI slots.

Six full PCI slots

With six full PCI slots, there isn't enough space on the PCB for the AGP slot to peacefully coexist with the DIMM slot tabs. The only fix I can see is either ditching the CNR slot, which could yield a few centimeters of clearance, or moving the IDE ports towards the lower edge of the board instead of beside the DIMM slots.

DIMM slots support up to 3GB of memory

The KT400+ Pro supports up to 3GB of DDR SDRAM, but on-board IDE RAID is conspicuously absent. At this point, I would have thought that IDE RAID would be a standard feature for enthusiast-oriented motherboards, if not for actual RAID applications, then at least for the extra IDE ports. Extra IDE ports can cut down on the number of devices forced to share IDE channels in a slave/master relationship. Personally, I like my PC to be involved in as little S&M as possible.

Look ma: no temperature probe!

AMD's Athlon XP processors feature an internal diode that should produce more accurate core temperature measurements than external thermal probes. The KX400+ Pro's socket doesn't have a thermal probbe, and it's the first board that I've seen that reads the CPU temperature directly from AMD's internal diode.

I wouldn't recommend using older Spitfire-based Durons or Thunderbird-based Athlons in the KX400+ Pro, though. AMD's older processors don't have internal diodes, and the absence of a socket-mounted thermal probe means you won't get any thermal monitoring.

A standard array of ports

You'll find all the usual suspects in the KX400+ Pro's port cluster. Those two USB ports support USB 2.0, and the board can support four more USB ports via a single PCI slot plate. You get only the standard audio jacks with the KX400+ Pro, but there's actually a set of S/PDIF output pins on the board for what seems to be an optional output header. A number of more recent motherboards with integrated audio support digital inputs and outputs, and it's good to see that the KX400+ Pro has at least very basic support built in.