3 - Albatron

Albatron

Here we arrive at the wonderful boobs, ehm booth of Albatron. Things have been difficult for Albatron over the past 2-3 years, but over the last year things seem to have picked up a little, and that's good since it's a great manufacturer responsible for excellent products.

Typically it is very easy to recognize an Albatron mainboard due to their design. They moved from blue to black, great idea for the color of the PCB. This is their Intel P45 based mainboard with support for a 1600 Mhz FSB, DDR2-800, dual x16 PCI-express for Crossfire and GigE ethernet.

These little half height puppies you do not see often. This actually is a PCI based GeForce 8500 with 256 Megs on board. Since it has the NVIDIA video decoder you can decode 1080P with is, ideal for slim-line HTPCs, hence the small 1U design.

This is the Albatron GeForce 9600 GSO. Very cost effective, sub 100 EUR versus pretty good performance. We'll have a review on one of these cards yet from POV, check it out in our hardware reviews section.