Albatron PX865PE Pro II

Author: Antti Valkeinen Published: 14.09.2003 Manufacturer: Albatron Product group: Motherboards

Layout:

MB

Albatron PX865PE Pro II is all about a style. Blue PCB and white PCI slots combined to colour coded memory slots and other connectors definitely gives motherboard very appealing look. Layout is very regular, i865PE chipset is located between AGP slot and processor socket, other connectors are scattered at the PCB's edges usual way. Exception is floppy connectors which are for some reason located at the very bottom of the motherboard.

AGP slot & DIMMs

Albatron suffers from the same problem as almost every motherboard nowadays. AGP slot and DIMM slots are too near from each other and installing memory is almost impossible if there is card in AGP slot. I understand that there is very limited space available and this problem is hard to fix, but some have manufacturers have done it so it is still possible. It seems that this is one of those problems, which only reviewers and such are interested on and actually normal users don't care about it. I have to say that IDE-connectors and ATX power connector are very nicely located compared to AGP & DIMM slots but floppy connector is below 5th PCI slot so there could be problem.

AGP slot & DIMMs

At the lower part of the motherboard there is yellow IDE RAID connectors and just above them SATA connectors. At the very bottom of the motherboard one can see DIP-switches, which are for adjusting Voice Genie™’s language setting, AGP protection, and BIOS Mirror™ when needed. Red CMOS clear jumper is at very nice location where it is easy to find and use.

At the bottom-edge there are connectors for power and HDD LEDs and also for reset and power switches. None of them are colour coded so putting right cables to right place is going to be hard without manual. Colour codes wouldn't hurt, would they?

Connectors

Albatron has some why decided to use active cooling for a chipset. Copper cooler with transparent fan is surely good looking combo but when you put power on, LEDs start to glow they blue light and cooler look absolutely stunning. Only problem is that cooler is fastened only from two points and that way fastening isn't surely as firm as it could be.

Chipset cooler

Power circuitry:

Processor's power circuitry is almost similar compared to earlier reviewed Asus P4P800. Three-phased circuitry is controlled by ADP3180, which is compatible with Intel's VRD/VRM 10 specifications. In theory Albatron PX865PE Pro II is that why Prescott compatible but only time will tell us how they work in practice.

Power circuitry regulates voltage from 12V, which is why P4 power connector is located very near power circuitry. Locating thin 12V power connector very near power circuitry and putting ATX power connector somewhere else reduces cable mess remarkably.

Power circuitry

Too low capacity and low quality capacitors have been perhaps biggest problem on the motherboard industry during last few years and caused numerous power circuitry failures. PX865PE Pro II has three Sanyo 1800uF 16V, three Sanyo 2200uF 6.3V and four nameless 820uF 2.5V capacitors. Capacitors are at least sufficient by their values but I have no personal experience about Sanyo capacitors so their quality is enigma to me.

Power circuitry

Motherboard layout with its little problems is still at least good. External appreance of motherboard is most likely one of the most appealing on the market. So no big complaints here.

Features:

IDE and SATA controllers:

IDE and SATA controllers

Albatron PX865PE Pro II has Promise PDC20276 IDE RAID controller and ICH5R, which have integrated IDE and SATA controllers. ICH5R's SATA controller also supports RAID 0 and RAID 1 and Promise's PDC20276 also supports RAID 0 and RAID 1, so you have RAID for both PATA and SATA. Totally you can plug in eight PATA and two SATA devices.

I tested all controllers as usual. For IDE I used IBM 80GB 120GXP HDD and for SATA tests I used Western Digital WD2500JD SATA HDD. Next graphs show SiSoft Sandra results.

SiSoft Sandra 2003 HDD performance

On graph there are results of few most used PATA and SATA controllers and I have added few result which separates from usual result for that controller. So there is no Albatron ICH5R SATA result because it was just as good as Epox 4PDA2+ result but IDE performance was quite weak. There could be same problem which bothered Asus P4P800 too ("32-bit data transfer"), but I couldn't find any setting that could make IDE performance any faster.

Audio:

Via Envy24PT

One of the best and most unique features of Albatron PX865PE Pro II is definitely its audio solution. There is no usual cheap and low quality 5.1 audio chip onboard but very good and feature rich VIA Envy24PT. This raises Albatron to it's own level concerning integrated audio features and quality.

Chip is same that is used for example on Terratec Aureon 7.1 Space soundcard. 24-bit resolution and 96kHz sampling rate is where the chip takes it's lead compared to other integrated audio solutions. In addition to that chip offers 7.1 audio output which is also very unique and makes possible to repeat Dolby Digital EX and DTS ES DVD video audio tracks.

Surely chip supports most used 3D audio standards like A3D, EAX 1.0 and EAX 2.0. There is either no lack of input/output connectors since in addition to analog 7.1 outputs there are also optical and coaxial digital outputs and inputs. Normal analog microphone, line-in and headset outputs are naturally present.

Compared to nForce2 MCP-T Soundstorm Envy24 lacks of Dolby Digital encoding, which is handy if you want to use 5.1 or 7.1 audio with digital outputs. There is AC3 pass through but it is just for DVD and it is a pity that Envy24PT couldn't do Dolby Digital encoding. There is no even solution to this because PCI bus just cannot handle data which is needed to encode 7.1 sound and that’s why Soundstorm(which doesn't use PCI bus) is going to be better on this for sometime.

Back panel

Tests are driven by using analog output and input (16-bit 44KHz).

Sound quality of VIA Envy24PT is good, but compared to Terratec SoundSystem DMX 6Fire 2496 which is based on almost same chip (VIA Envy24) is Terratec SoundSystem DMX 6Fire 2496 clearly better. Difference is due to ADC and DAC codec used. PX865PE Pro II uses VIA VT1616 AC97 codec, which is cheap way to do the job, but Terratec uses very high quality and expensive DAC, which are better. So feature rich VIA Envy24PT is just not enough, you have to have good ADC and DAC codecs too.

One should remember that comparable Terratec Aureon 7.1 Space is over 100€ soundcard and you get it almost for free in Albatron PX865PE Pro II. Very high quality ADCs and DACs cost a fortune and therefore standalone soundcard is still best choice if high quality analog output is priority.

LAN:

Intel 82547EI ET LAN (CSA)

Intel 82547EI ET LAN is best network controller utilizing CSA bus (and only). Most i865PE and I875P based motherboards doesn't utilize CSA bus at all and instead of it they have cheaper 100 or 1000Mbps PCI bus network controller. Albatron really hasn't bargained for quality and speed and those are what you get from Intel 82547EI. Full speed transfers at 1Gbps network are much faster and strain much less CPU and busses than with network controller utilizing PCI bus. PCI bus has very limited transfer rate and it really should be used other purposes than transmitting data which could be transferred on CSA bus. Well you still can easily manage with PCI bus if you don't have gigabit network and you are transmitting data only on 10/100 network as you can notice from benchmarks that I drove at my 100Mbps LAN.

Albatron hasn't compromised anything on this area. It is quite clear that most of us certainly do not need network controller utilizing CSA bus, but sooner or later you will need it. When you buy Albatron PX865PE Pro II you will get network controller which really is gigabit capable so why not upgrade your home network to gigabit speeds today?

Maximum transfer rate was tested using SiSoft Sandra 2003 and CPU load test was performed by transferring big file from machine to machine at the same time as I manually monitored CPU load. Transfer rate is limited by another system which I use on the tests.

100Mbps network doesn't strain these gigabit network controllers very much. Speeds and CPU loads are very near each others at P4 systems.

Firewire and USB:

VIA VT6307

VIA VT6307 provides two firewire connections and ICH5R provides eight USB 2.0 connectors but only six of them are usable. I couldn't test how firewire works in this board but it is there and those who need it are surely happy about it.

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