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The
Albatron PX875 Pro
Motherboard |
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A
Lot To Offer |
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The Board:
Upon first
glance, there is no arguing that Albatron knows how to make
a sharp looking product. Their choice of colors make
identifying the various components a little easier.
Aside from aesthetics, however, we felt that there were a
number of puzzling things with this motherboard that
contradicts its "Pro" branding. Let's start off with
some of the positives.
The PX875 Pro
motherboard comes based on the Intel 875P chipset which
offers a good feature set and Performance Acceleration
Technology. The placement of the board's various
components were as good as we've seen. We were
impressed with the 20-pin ATX power position as well as the
secondary 4-pin ATX connector. All too often we see
these two power connectors split across a motherboard,
causing the cabling to span a bit of real estate. In
this case, the connectors were close to each other, on
either side of the DIMM slots, allowing the power cabling to
fall more naturally into place and out of the way of the CPU
socket area.
The Northbridge
sports a hefty, gold color heat sink to help control its
temperature. The design is heavily extruded, allowing
for good airflow across the sink. The board comes with
a total of 4 DIMM slots supporting up to 1GB per slot, which
should prove to be more than ample for even the most
demanding user. The board has a total of 5 PCI slots
for expansion as well as an AGP slot with an interesting
slide-lock mechanism. The locking mechanism may not be
as simple and effective as the popular hinge design, but it
does the trick.
The rear ATX
cluster is more of a legacy design than we would have
expected in a "Pro" model motherboard. The unit sports
2 PS/2, 2 USB and one 10/100 Ethernet connector.
Surprisingly, Albatron chose to drive this board's
Ethernet with a 3COM chip rather than using the native CSA
(Communication Streaming Architeture) bus on the i875 along
with Intel's Gig-E controller. Also, the
addition of a third party Ethernet chip still left them the
option to make it Gigabit ready, but they unfortunately
opted for 10/100. Lastly, the board comes with 2
serial ports and 1 Parallel port for legacy support as well
as a DB-15 joystick port and audio connections.
After going over
the physical qualities of the PX975 Pro, we must admit we
were a bit perplexed as to the "Pro" naming convention.
While the board is labeled a "Pro", when we compare the
features of the PX875 Pro to the non-pro version, the only
real difference between the two is the Pro version has
10/100 LAN and the other doesn't. Does an Ethernet
upgrade warrant the "Pro" name? Apparently Albatron
thinks so. We would expect that a "Pro" model would
have several features that the standard model doesn't, like
perhaps better Audio, Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire and/or
RAID. But in this case it all comes down to 10/100
Ethernet which is a prerequisite for most motherboards these
days anyway.
The Bios:
The BIOS that
lies at the core of the PX875 Pro is the Phoenix - Award
Setup Utility. This version of the popular BIOS is
well equipped for modifying and optimizing system
performance. We found the selection of performance
options quite good, with a good selection of overclocking
options as well. Along with setting the memory timings
and the intensity of PAT, the board sported an ample
collection of other advanced options. The most
generous by far was a FSB setting that ranged from 200MHz to
550MHz.
When it comes to
memory speed, the BIOS doesn't offer the common ratio or
locked speed settings, but rather a multiple of the memory
speed itself. So when we boosted our FSB up to 260 for
example, we set the memory to run at 1.6x or 208MHz (416MHz
DDR). These options could be set as low as 1.33x and
as high as 2.5x Turbo. The AGP/PCI/SRC settings were
also numerous, giving a lot of flexibility for each
component.
When it came to
core voltages for the CPU, AGP and Memory, the values were
represented as increases over stock voltage rather than
actual voltage settings. So, for example, we found the
CPU voltage could be increased to +.3, +.2 or +.1v.
The AGP voltage options were the least impressive with the
ability to increase it no more than .1v. On the memory
side of things, the DDR voltage could be increased just like
the CPU, from +.3, +.2 or +.1v.
Overall, we
liked the available options in this version of the Phoenix
BIOS, although although we would have liked to see more
voltage range for the CPU core adjustments.
Nonetheless, they get the job done with a fair amount to
options to play with. What do you say we start
tinkering with some of these settings and see what surprises
this motherboard has for us?
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Overclocking the
Albatron PX875 Pro
Motherboard |
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Turning Up the MHz. |
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When it comes to
overclocking, no processor is currently more gratifying than
the Pentium 4 C @ 2.4GHz. This little gem of a CPU has
a ton of headroom, allowing some users to hit 3.2GHz with
standard cooling. So, naturally we were eager to see
how ours matched up with the PX875 Pro. To get things
started, we immediately upped the FSB to 240MHz. The
system posted and booted into Windows without error.
Next we jumped to 250MHz and once again, no problems,
although we did have to set the memory ratio to 1.6X,
keeping our memory in the 400MHz range. Without that
adjustment, the system would not post because our memory
couldn't run at 500MHz. Next we set the FSB to 260MHz
and still, the system posted and loaded Windows without
error. In one last effort to squeeze out the MHz, we
set the FSB to 265MHz and rebooted. The system booted,
Windows began to load and then the screen briefly flashed a
BSOD and rebooted. So it looked like we were going to
call the top speed at 260MHz. Now we needed to run
some numbers to show the gains we found.
Unfortunately,
that is where the problems began. As it turned out,
the PX875 Pro was one of those motherboards that tended to
corrupt a hard drive when overclocked too high. Even
after we set the FSB back to 200MHz, the system would repeat
the same BSOD and reboot cycle. Thankfully, we took a
disk image beforehand just in case this happened, so we were
able to restore and begin again. Just to be sure that
it wasn't a fluke, we booted at 265 FSB again and sure
enough, we got a BSOD and reboot as well as hard drive
corruption. We restored once again, set the FSB to
260MHz and called it a day. All in all, a 60MHz
increase in bus speed on a motherboard with a quad pumped
processor is a major boost. In the pages ahead, we'll
get a better idea of how this all adds up.
Time For Sandra & Futuremark's Finest
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