Board layout
Albatron seems to have settled on a bluish-turquoise color for its mainboards, which isn't terribly unique. Still, the board's coloring isn't too garish for more conservative types, or too dull for those with case windows.

The K8X800 Pro II's primary power plug is nicely located along the edge of the board, and there's enough room between the secondary four-pin plug and the CPU socket to ensure power cables don't interfere with air flow.

Users may have a hard time, however, routing a ribbon cable to the board's floppy port, which is buried about as far away from a typical case's external 3.5" bay as possible. Thankfully, floppy drives are on their way out, so the awkward placement shouldn't inconvenience too many users.

Next to its floppy port, the K8X800 Pro II sports six PCI slots that offer plenty of capacity to add peripherals. However, considering that the board has Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1-channel audio, and Serial ATA RAID out of the box, I suspect few users will take advantage of even half of the available PCI slots.

Boards with six PCI slots typically experience clearance conflicts between AGP cards and DIMM slot retention tabs, and the K8X800 Pro II is no exception. Longer AGP cards can get in the way of the board's DIMM slot tabs, so some users may have to remove their graphics card to swap out memory modules.

Speaking of memory, the K8X800 Pro II has three DIMM slots that can hold up to a gigabyte of memory each. Only two of the board's DIMM slots can be used with memory running above 166MHz, limiting the K8X800 Pro II's maximum DDR400 capacity to 2GB. This limit is nothing new for Athlon 64 boards—I've yet to see a Socket 754 board support more than 2GB of DDR400 memory. Still, it's odd to see 2 and 3GB memory capacity limits on such boards given the Athlon 64's ability to address more than 4GB of memory.

The K8X800 Pro II's 754-pin CPU socket can host any of AMD's current Athlon 64 chips, with the exception of the expensive Athlon 64 FX models. Though it's not pictured here, the K8X800 Pro II comes with the necessary retention bracket and back plate to secure standard Athlon 64 heat sinks. Not every manufacturer is bundling boards with a retention bracket, so Albatron gets a couple of bonus points here.

On the storage front, the K8X800 Pro II comes with a couple of ATA/133 and Serial ATA ports. The ports are conveniently located along the edge of the board and should have no problem reaching drives in even the tallest ATX cases.

Around the rear, the K8X800 Pro II is peppered with an assortment of peripheral ports. In addition to PS/2, serial, and parallel ports, the port cluster includes an assortment of analog audio jacks, an Ethernet port, and a couple of USB ports. But that's not all.

Albatron also provides access to a game port, another serial port, two Firewire ports, and four more USB ports via PCI expansion headers. Wait, there's more.

If those analog audio ports weren't enough, the K8X800 Pro II also comes with a PCI slot cover filled with Tos-Link and coaxial digital S/PDIF input and output ports.

I really appreciate the fact that Albatron is giving users access to a wide range of expansion ports, but having this many PCI slot covers is silly, because the expansion ports end up blocking PCI slots. Chaintech, DFI, and Soyo incorporate extra expansion ports into 3.5" and 5.25" drive bay inserts, which avoid blocking PCI slots and give users easier access to oft-used expansion ports. Albatron should do the same.