Albatron PX865PE Pro II

Company: Albatron
Product: PX865PE
Street Price: ~$185 USD
Date Reviewed: July 8, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao

Onboard Features:

Starting off with the rear I/O configuration we can see that the motherboard has two PS/2 connections for keyboard and mouse, a serial port, parallel port, two USB ports, a LAN connection, and all the audio jacks. This is a decent configuration but we would have like to have seen possibly more USB ports and a FireWire port. the board does support IEEE 1394 FireWire but the ports are found on an extra bracket along with a few extra USB ports.

The ICH5R supports eight USB devices and two Serial ATA devices.  The chip also offers RAID 0 for the Serial ATA drives. We have seen a few other manufacturers provide support for two more Serial ATA drives by adding the Silicon Image chip. The Albatron board doesn't support any more SATA drives other than the two offered by the chipset. Honestly, SATA is still in its early stages so we don't think that support for four drives with RAID 0 and 1 functions is a major issue. As a matter of fact, we don't even have a single SATA drive.

The board does offer IDE RAID as well as the SATA RAID provided by the ICH5R. The Promise PDC20276 offers RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 0+1 using ATA 133 and all previous drives. The chip supports two independent IDE channels and up to four drives (obviously if you can run RAID 0+1). IDE RAID is a much cheaper solution compared to SCSI and even perhaps Serial ATA. You might not want the fastest transfer speeds but just the security that comes with running a RAID setup.

Intel's 8254EI Gigabit Ethernet Controller provides the LAN capabilities on this motherboard. The chip bypasses the PCI bus and connects to the CSA (Communication Streaming Architecture) bus in the 865PE chipset. This overcomes the bandwidth limitation found when running on the PCI bus. Gigabit Ethernet is slowly becoming a standard and will replace 100 Mbit. The addition of Intel CSA Gigabit LAN makes this board a good candidate for server/workstation applications. We really like to see that Albatron took advantage of the CSA bus by adding Gigabit capabilities.

Here is something that we are starting to see more of. The PX865PE Pro II has a dual BIOS setup. This is a really nice safety feature considering BIOSes do go bad sometimes. Basically, how this works is if for some reason your main BIOS fails, the other one is automatically loaded. Then from the "good" one, the user can flash the "bad" one back to working condition. We tested the dual BIOS by using some overclocked values that would not normally work. The computer would not post, but after about 10 seconds the other BIOS would kick in. We have seen this feature on other boards such as Gigabyte and it is a nice addition to any motherboard.

The sound on the motherboard is controlled by the VIA ENVY24PT and the VIA VT1616 chips. The VIA ENVY24PT chip allows for 24-bit resolution and 96KHz sampling rates and even 8 Channel audio. The VT1616 audio codec supports the AC'97 2.2 specification and provides support for S/PDIF which is available on an extra bracket. 8 channel audio totally compliments this package considering all the features that Albatron bundled with this board. Most people will be satisfied by the board's sound capabilities.

The VIA VT6307 supports the motherboards FireWire. IEEE 1394 FireWire allows for data transfer rates up to 400 Mbps and is commonly used with things like digital camcorders, printers, and hard drives because of the high transfer rates. Another benefit to FireWire is the hot swapping abilities and the plug and play functions, making operating that much easier than having to configure everything. You can hook up two independent FireWire devices with the VT6307.