Albatron PX865PE Pro II

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

BIOS Configuration:

The BIOS is going to be one of the most important features for overclockers when deciding on a motherboard for their system. Let's take a look and see what Albatron's BIOS offers and if it is going to appeal to the overclockers.

In the Advanced Chipset Features, there are options to change all the memory timings such as CAS Latency and Active to Precharge Delay. Changing the memory timings can increase the memory performance of the system but for inexperienced users, it can just bring instabilities along with pounding headaches. There are a few other options in this menu such as setting the AGP Aperture Size. For today's faster video cards, it almost doesn't matter what you set the Aperture Size to but some people still want to change it.

The FSB options can be changed from 200 to 333 in 1 MHz increments. This is a good option for the overclockers to have considering there will not be many people using over 333 for the FSB anyway. We have seen boards with higher options, going beyond 400 but with today's CPUs 333 should be just fine.

Here are the voltages allowed by the motherboard. For the VCore the highest selectable option is 1.6V. We really would have liked to have seen much more voltage on the VCore. Perhaps up to 1.85V or so. 1.6V is not going to be enough for the hardcore overclockers, although it will allow for some decent overclocking. The DRAM voltages go up to 2.85V which is pretty good. We always say that 3V+ would be nice but 2.85V is fair.

The last menu in the BIOS that we would like to look at is the PC Health. This window shows all the system vitals such as voltages, temperatures, and fan speeds. This is a basic setup of the health menu. There are other boards that additional options to be able to set up alarms and shutdown temperatures. Although those options are not necessary, they are still nice to have, especially for the really paranoid end-user.