Albatron PX865PE Pro II

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

Board Layout:

The board layout is nice for the most part. The 20-pin ATX power connector is on the far right side of the motherboard and high enough to where it will help to keep the cables out of the way from the rest of the components such as the heatsink. There are of course four DIMM slots but each are color coded to help show which ones to use for dual channel. Just match the colors and your system will be in a DC mode. The IDE connectors are just below the ATX connector making them high enough on the motherboard to reach drives even in full tower cases, however the floppy connector is at the very bottom of the motherboard. There is a little bit of clutter to the left side of the socket and some very large heatsinks may not fit properly on this motherboard. The two IDE channels are towards the bottom right corner of the motherboard. This could have been a little bit higher but there is nothing really wrong with where they are placed.

Albatron has decided to support the enthusiasts out there and use an active cooling heatsink on the Northbridge. This heatsink actually has some copper unlike a lot of the aluminum ones that we look at and also this one has a blue LED modification for those case modders with the fancy windows. The LED is not overwhelming with brightness but it looks very cool and low profile. Also on the heatsink it says "GHz" declaring that this board is a good overclocker. We shall see if this holds true in the overclocking portion of the review.

This isn't the clearest picture but it shows one of the few complaints we had about the layout. The AGP slot is too close to the DIMMs. This is a very common mistake that we see all the time on at least 50% of the motherboards we review. Having these two so close to each other makes it impossible to remove/add memory to the DIMM slots unless the AGP card is removed. This is a hassle for people who try out new memory all the time, which for enthusiasts can be quite often.