Albatron PX865PE Pro II

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

Bundled Features:

The overall bundle included with this motherboard is pretty good. You get all the manuals for the motherboard, RAID, and a quick reference sheet. Floppy and IDE cables are included of course, along with a SATA power cable and a SATA cable. We have seen a few other manufacturers providing more than one SATA cable and a few power cables. Since the board supports two drives, maybe Albatron should have added one more SATA cable and another power cable. It is nice to see that they have even added a power cable since we have reviewed a few boards that provided no power cable. There is an interesting situation with SATA power cables. The makers of the drives are not providing them with their drives. Hopefully motherboard manufacturers and drive makers will get this sorted out because there are a few consumers who are very surprised to receive their drive and realize they have to go back to buy more cables.

Here are a few extra brackets that come with the board. These are going to be extremely helpful since there are only two USB ports and no FireWire ports on the rear I/O configuration. You can see from the picture above that one bracket supports four more USB connections. The middle bracket add ports for two IEEE 1394 FireWire devices. The last bracket isn't really that exciting but it gives another COM port and a Game port. The extra brackets just allow for that many more devices to be hooked up and we think there are enough ports to satisfy all users.

Here is the last bracket included with the mainboard. As you can see this bracket provides connections for SPDIF in/out, headphones, and Mic in. This makes the bundle that much more attractive because now users can add more multimedia devices making this a great motherboard for power users. We are starting to see more motherboard manufacturers provided nice features like these and as time goes on the features start becoming standard and people expect to see them when they purchase a board.