The BIOS for the Albatron PX925XE Pro-R is of the Phoenix Award variety which has both basic and advanced features.
One item I do like is the ability to choose boot devices. But motherboards have been doing that for years, I hear you say. Well this time around you can pick each individual device, for example you can choose to boot from hard drive first, and then pick which hard drive you want to boot from. A nice touch for those who want to dual boot Windows and Linux without worrying about messing up MBR's.
When it comes to hardware monitoring, things are rudimentary but they do suffice. You can enable a 'smart' CPUFAN temperature which will adjust the fan speed according to the CPU temperature, as well as get a lit of current voltages and other temperatures.
For overclockers, the BIOS provides the ability to key in directly an FSB between 200-300 which seems a little low considering that a 925XE is designed to run at 266 to start with. However should you be dropping in a 200FSB CPU then you at least know the motherboard is good up to 300. Voltages for the CPU, Ram and Northbridge can all be increased, and it's good to see that we can lock the PCI/PCIe frequencies at defaults.
Ram options are a little on the limited side with options for 400 or 566 or Auto being the only speed choices, however you can adjust all the timings.
As with the PX925X, the Albatron PX925XE Pro-R features an 'Afterburner' option for overclocking which will take some of the worry out of overclocking for those new to it. What this basically does is dynamically overclock the CPU dependent on the load, so surfing the web will leave things at defaults but if you go and play a game or do some vid encoding or something equally as CPU intensive, then the FSB is raised to accommodate. Also included is the Watchdog timer, which will quickly test overclocked settings as you POST, and if any instability is detected the system is reset to default FSB without the need to clear CMOS. While I can see the benefit of this, the main negative here is that you will never be completely sure you have reached the maximum overclock since the motherboard decides for you (you can't turn off the Watchdog) what is a bad overclock and what isn't. Infact, the Watchdog never even kicked in for me on this motherboard and I had to use the CMOS clear jumper instead.
Overall the BIOS isn't outstanding but it does have everything you are likely to need.
Testing
Test Setup: Albatron PX925X Pro, Pentium 540 (3.2GHz), Vapochill Lightspeed [AC], 2x512 Kingston HyperX PC2-5300, Albatron Trinity PC6600GT Graphics, Maxtor SATA150 80GB, 1x Maxtor PATA 160GB, Windows SP2
The comparison board will be the Albatron PX925X Pro. What we will be looking for is to see if any extra performance is brought to the table by the PX925XE Pro-R.
Test software will be:
- Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and memory speeds, using the 32-bit 2004 version.
- The ZD Winstone suite is a script that runs a series of actions and calculates a final score that measures a PC's overall performance.
- Sysmark 2004 is BAPCo's latest revision of the mainstream office productivity and Internet content creation benchmark used to characterize the performance of the business client. It uses a number of real-world applications and runs them through a series of tests. We tested with the office and content creation benchmarks.
- We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.
- Bad Company - 10 from 9 was ripped into one 414MB .wav file. We then encoded that .wav file into a 320Kb/s sample rate MP3.
- We used an Animatrix file, titled The Second Renaissance Part 1, and a WAV created from VirtualDub. The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes, seconds, and lower is better.
Unreal Tournament 2004, Quake III: Arena - both games were run at 640x480 with minimal detail and sound disabled to test CPU/Subsystem performance.
All benchmarks were run a total of three times, with the average results shown here today. Memory timings were configured at 4-4-4-12 at DDR400 and sound was enabled, because lets face it, you don't run without sound, so why should we test it without? Naturally of course we tested the onboard sound to see what kind of impact using it had on system performance.
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