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Albatron
PX915G Pro:
If you're looking for a price efficient way into the 915
and LGA775 world, this Albatron board could be an option. |
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PCI Express, the PCI technology of the future
for computers. As such Intel has decided to make a drastic
change on their motherboards. Gone is the AGP interface,
yet the PCI interface still remains, also gone for the most part
is DDR memory replaced by DDR2. The suddenness of this change
took many people by surprise, as they would no longer be able
to use their prized AGP video cards if they wanted to upgrade
to the new socket 775 processors.
Intel released a couple of different chipsets
to support these new standards, first there is the 925X chipset
which is the top of the line, much like the 875P was/is; then
there is the 915P chipset, which is placed similar to the 865PE
chipset; and lastly there is the 915G chipset, which is the 915P
with integrated graphics much like the 865G chipset. For
a little more info on the various chipsets, look
at Hubert's primer on them. Some of the original chipsets
had to be recalled by Intel due to problems with them, but that
should now be resolved.
Albatron is a company we here at Viperlair
have dealt with previously both with a few motherboards and also
a few video cards. For the most part the quality of the
pieces has been fairly good, and provided good performance for
the money. With Intel processor based motherboards, they have
continuously used Intel chipsets, so its no surprise that the
new socket 775 boards they have are based on the new chipsets.
Albatron PX915G Pro
Albatron decided to ship us the 915G based
motherboard, so this board comes with integrated video, which
we will look at as well. So what did Albatron provide with
this motherboard, is it a small bundle or something more substantial.
Lets look at a couple of pictures to find out.
Now here is an itemized list
of what you get:
- Motherboard
- Motherboard and RAID manuals
- 4 port USB back plate
- 1 SATA drive cable
- 1 SATA power cable
- Driver CD
- Quick Install Guides Motherboard and CPU
- 3 * 80 pin IDE cables
- Floppy cable
- Back plate
We see that Albatron has supplied us with
more than enough IDE cables, as every available IDE port has a
cable to use. However when we look at the four SATA headers
on the motherboard, and the single SATA cable included it strikes
us as rather odd. My suggestion here to Albatron take one
or two IDE cables out and put a couple more SATA cables in, as
they are still not as prevalent as IDE cables are. Otherwise
the package is pretty well thought out, as all the USB ports are
covered with the included back plate. The manuals are pretty
good, with all things being covered pretty well, in multiple languages,
and the quick install guide making the process easier.
One of the main arrivals with
the new Intel chipsets is shown in the picture above this.
The PCI Express slots, of which there are two types in this system,
giving us a 1/2/3 (PCI Express x16/PCI Express x1/PCI) configuration.
The x1 slots are shorter than the older PCI slots, which allows
manufacturers to put a couple more chips in that area, so that
the rest of the board isn't as crowded.
Now we move to the bottom
part of the board, where the IDE ports are located.
First up is the Intel based ports, which is the red IDE port
and all of the SATA ports, of which there are four.
The other controller is the ITE
Tech IT8212F IDE controller which provides RAID 0/1 functions
to the extra two (yellow) IDE ports located on the board.
This brings the total number of drives that you can use to
ten, with four of them being SATA drives and the other six
being IDE devices.
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The memory slots, one of
the rather important aspects of the motherboard. The
915 series supports DDR-II memory, but it also supports good
old DDR(-I) memory as well. Albatron has chosen to use
the old but still more available DDR interface for this particular
board, which is very nice in my opinion. This allows
you to only have to upgrade three pieces instead of the possible
fourth which can be somewhat expensive. Looking now
at the backplate for the motherboard, we see that there is
very little that is similar to the old ATX standard backplate,
except for the PS/2 connectors. Looking to the right
of those, we see the lone serial port, the parallel printer
connector, and the VGA out port. Then we reach a block
of 1/8" outputs which are for the 8 channel audio that
this system has. Lastly there are two seemingly identical
blocks, with two USB connectors and a network port.
The only difference is that the network connector on the left
is the 10/100 connector and the right is the Gigabit connector.
Here are the two NIC
controllers that control the two network ports that we
saw on the backplate of the system. First is the
Via VT6105LOM chip which provides the basic 10/100
features of the VT6105 while being put in a small package
specifically for integrating onto motherboards.
Next is the
Marvell 88E8001 chip, which provides the gigabit networking
on the motherboard. The downside of this particular
controller is that it is still based on the PCI bus, which
means that it is sharing the bandwidth, all of which it
needs for gigabit transfers, with the IDE hard drives,
and anything in the PCI slots. I would have preferred
to see the newer 88E8050 PCI Express chip instead, as
it would have an independent 1Gbps to use, much like the
CSA gigabit NIC on some 875P and 865 based boards.
Lets now look at three
other controller chips. First is the
Realtek ALC880 sound CODEC which helps supply the
sound for the HD audio Intel has implemented in the 915
and 925 based boards. This provides 7.1 support,
at what should be pretty good quality especially for a
onboard sound card, we will look at that later.
Next is the ICH6 which has an SL spec of SL7AG, which
means that it is a ICH6 with no RAID or wireless capabilities.
All IDE based devices, the sound chip, and PCI devices
all run off of this hub. Next is the MCH, which
has an SL spec of SL7LX which shows it to be the 915G
chipset. This, as we mentioned previously supports
both DDR-I and DDR-II memory, has an integrated graphics
chip running at 333MHz (which we will look at in another
article), a x16 PCI Express port, and supports dual channel
memory and uses the LGA775 socket.
The heatsinks of this
system are something to consider as well. Yes heatsinks,
as both the MCH and the ICH have heatsinks on them, something
that hasn't shown up much previously, except on a few
overclocking boards. Both heatsinks are bonded using
thermal pads, which I personally hate, and would prefer
to see thermal paste instead. Neither heatsink has
a fan on it, helping to keep things quieter. The
MCH heatsink is bigger than its the ICH's heatsink, and
uses four hooks to hold the heatsink down. The ICH's
heatsink is more reminiscent of the older MCH heatsinks
used on the 865PE series of boards, and uses two hooks
to hold the heatsink down.
NEXT
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Copyright
© 2001-2006 Viper Lair. All Rights Reserved.
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