Albatron PX925XE Pro-R Motherboard Review
The introduction of Intel's 925XE chipset
marks a turning point in the long life of the Pentium
4 processor. With the 925XE, the P4's front side bus had finally
breached the 1GHz mark - jumping from 800MHz to 1066MHz FSB.
There are many reasons for this latest FSB
increase, but it all really just boils down to AMD. You see, when AMD
released the Socket 939 version Athlon64, Intel's Pentium 4 processor
fell behind the performance curve, a lot. While Intel's high end
Extreme Edition processors were just as fast as AMD's best, it's mainstream
Pentium 4's lagged behind equivalent AMD CPUs.
To counter
this situation, Intel engineers raised the FSB of the newest Pentium4 processors to 1066MHz. This is basically a cheap and effective way to increase performance without having redesign the entire core architecture. Enthusiasts and overclockers have long known that increasing FSB speeds even slightly, while keeping the processor speed at approximately the same figure, can often increase performance past that of a CPU which is the next speed grade up. Here's an example, a Pentium 4 2.4C
benchmarks faster than a Pentium 4 2.66B in most applications thanks to its faster operational FSB. With the bus speed operating quicker, data moves between components faster and that's why overall performance increases. Now that Intel has migrated to the 1066 MHz FSB, the performance gap between Pentium 4 and Athlon64 processors should by all accounts shrink a little. Good news certainly for the boys in blue.
At the
tip of the current chipset ice berg is the Intel 925XE, and motherboards like
the Albatron PX925XE
Pro-R which are built upon its foundations. The 925XE chipset is a fickle one,
supporting only Socket 775 Pentium 4 processors compatible with an 800 MHz or
1066 MHz FSB.
Its four dual channel DDR-2 memory sockets will
accommodate up to 4GB of non-ECC unbuffered DDR2 memory. Considering that the
925XE is ideally suited for use with '1066FSB' Pentium 4 Extreme Edition CPUs, as
a killer gaming rig, we'd recommend using at least 2GB of system memory for the
best benefit.
Onboard hardware features of the Albatron PX925XE Pro-R include; an IDE RAID controller,
7.1 channel 'Azailia' audio codec, Gigabit LAN adaptor & 10/100 NIC. Video is provided by the
single PCI Express x16 slot, while a pair of PCIe x1 slots and three conventional
PCI slots support expandability. A total of 4 SATA and 6 IDE drives/devices are supported. Four USB 2.0
ports provide external connectivity.
|
RSS Newsletter
