As you have seen from the above
benchmarks, the Albatron PX865PE Pro II is definitely a fast
performer.
At stock speeds, the motherboard performed on par with the AOpen
AX4SPE Max which is very good. The board we tested was able to hit as high as
227 MHz FSB with no problems. If Albatron allowed for higher voltages, or if we tested with a
lower clocked processor I'm sure we could have run the FSB much higher. Albatron even claims that
their motherboard can hit 1 GHz FSB right on the
box!
The PX865PE Pro II was a well equipped motherboard with
Serial ATA/ Serial ATA RAID, Ultra/133 IDE RAID, Intel CSA Gigabit Ethernet LAN,
IEEE 1394, dual bios's and even a software 7.1
soundcard!
The board has five PCI's should you need to expand, and the standard allotment
of four dual channel DIMM slots can accommodate up to 4 GB of PC1600/2100/2700/3200 DDR
RAM. Remember though, to run in dual channel memory mode with all four DIMM's
filled each memory channel must have the same size DIMM
installed.
The layout of the Albatron PX865PE Pro II Is pretty
good, the main IDE and ATX power connectors are in a good location as is the
ATX12V line. While most of its competitors are cooling the i865PE with passive
heatsinks, Albatron goes one step further and uses an active copper HSF
on their Northbridge. A big plus for peace of mind
here!
Located at the bottom of the motherboard, the floppy
drive connector may give users with larger/full tower cases problems if the FDD
is located too far away on the front panel. Next and definitely a bigger issue
with overclockers
(regular users like you and me don't need
to worry about this) is the relatively low maximum 1.6V Vcore
voltage. With it set so low, the more extreme overclockers out there will
have to modify their processors to get them running faster if they really want
to. Hopefully Albatron will give the end user higher Vcore options in the future, but so
far all i865 boards we have looked at had similar
settings.
In the end I think it is safe
to say that the Albatron PX865PE Pro II does very well for itself, and should
keep most people happy as the basis for a main
system.
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