Albatron's i845PE-board is a well balanced package. Bundle includes all the basic stuff that you need to get your system up and running. With six PCI-slots, Serial ATA, IDE-raid and six USB2.0-connectors you have plenty of room to expand your system around this motherboard. By including BIOS Mirror function Albatron made this board bit more tolerant to user errors and there are also some viruses that like to mess with the BIOS. There is also a nice feature called a Voice Genie. If there are some problems with the POST process you will not hear those loud beebs but you will hear a voice telling you what is wrong.

Performance was in par with other motherboards so it all comes down to integrated devices. Does this board have all what you need? There are no Firewire-ports included and IDE-raid doesn't support other devices than hard-drives. But like I said, well balanced board with all the essential features included plus some extras.

Maybe not the flashiest board around but why should it be? You get six USB2.0-ports, integrated network support and there is also an option for SPDIF-output. The board is few centimeters smaller than other rivals in this review and partly because of this there is not enough room between memory slots and AGP-slot. IDE- and floppy-connectors are also rotated 90 degrees and you have to run the cables over the AGP-card or bend the cable from couple of places. With rounded cables this isn't such a problem but this board comes with regular IDE-cables so this still an issue for some users.

Price of this board should be lower than these other motherboards so for a buyer with a budget this could be a excellent choice.

Many people refer Epox as a Mercedes of motherboard manufacturers. They have a good reputation being a manufacturer that makes quality products with rich feature sets. This board seems no different. You get IDE-raid, Serial ATA, integrated network support, two Firewire-ports and pin header for a bluetooth kit. To make their bundle even more appealing Epox throw in couple of rounded cables. This brings the price up a bit but it also saves you a trip because you don't have to go out and buy these separately. Rounded cables play an important role when you want to lower your case temperature so this was a wise move indeed from Epox. I also like their decision to place both power connectors to the back edge of the board. This also reduces wire clutter on front part of the case.

I'm not sure but it seems to me that Epox has been following what is happening with modding scene lately. By including those blue leds to their chipset cooler, they know that this move will get attention. There are other manufacturers moving in with the similar ideas but full credit goes to Epox for doing this first.

What can I say, a solid performance from a well known manufacturer. You can get up to ten USB2.0 devices and with their bundled SPDIF-rear bracket you will get a great audio experience out from this board. There are also such connectors as Memory Stick, Secure Digital and Smart Card as options. IDE-raid with support to all ATAPI-devices will get you maximum of eight IDE-devices. Standard stuff like integrated network support and Gigabyte's trademark DualBIOS will only make this board even more interesting. Serial ATA is missing from this model but Gigabyte has 8PE667 Ultra 2 for that.

There will be users who doesn't like active cooling on the chipset but I can only say that the fan included with the cooler was so silent that it shoudn't be a real problem for anyone. Performance was the same with all the other boards so that can't be used to choose which board is better over others. I've used Gigabyte's boards for a long time now and their new products just seems to get even better and better so I feel really confident about this product.

I was really impressed by the bundle that came with this board. SPDIF-rear bracket, Sigma box with four USB2.0-connectors and network activity light, three IDE-cables and 8-in-1 software package. Design of the board is clean and there is enough room between memory- and AGP-slots. All IDE- and floppy-connectors are facing the right direction and even the coloring of the motherboard seems to enhance this harmony. I have to congratulate Soyo for their decision to add that metal plate to support CPU socket from behind because the bending on other boards seemed so severe. I haven't heard any news saying that this kind of bending would have actually broken a motherboard but you never can be to sure, can you? ;)

There were some interesting results on benchmark with this board. It was the fastest with Pifast and managed to get good results on ViewPerf 7.0. These results alone proves that you don't have to have Intel chipset coupled with Intel processor. This board also has unofficial support for DDR400-memory but I didn't have proper memory to test this. Generally it is believed that this unofficial support doesn't work at all and you should ignore this feature completely. Rest of this product seemed to work with full 100% so you will have hard time to decide which product suits you best. :)