The Albatron PX925X Pro uses a 4MB Award BIOS which covers the basic and the not so basic features you would expect and require. It won't stand out amongst most enthusiast motherboard BIOS' but it does provide more than just basic options for tweaking.
Boot priorities for devices can be selected by group as well as dictating the order of those groups of devices, so for example if you have three hard drives, you can choose which of your hard drives gets the highest priority of booting.
Overclockers are catered for on the Frequency/Voltage Control page. Albatron also include a utility in their BIOS called 'Afterburner' overclocking, which dynamically overclocks the system as it is needed. So for example you can switch on Afterburner in the BIOS, load windows and surf the net all at defaults. Start Folding@Home and the system will overclock to a higher setting to provide you with an extra boost in performance. An interesting idea, although the overclocks I've seen with this have been minimal and somewhat inconsistent, and certainly not the same as overclocking manually. Bottom line, true tweakers need not apply, but this will be something that non-tweakers will be happy to see and use for a free boost.
Albatron have provided for manual overclocking with quite a few settings. You can key in an FSB speed between 200 and 300 FSB directly, allowing you to jump straight to an exact setting rather than having to scroll through a (often incomplete) list of numbers. This can be a great help if you are at a particularly high overclock and need to reset to defaults; it's nice to not have to scroll through a list of numbers you know the system is capable of to get back to that higher number.
Speaking of resetting the BIOS, the Albatron PX925X Pro has another utility called the 'Watchdog'. The Watchdog will reset the FSB back to CPU defaults if you overclock too far, negating the need to clear CMOS manually. I would have liked to have seen an option to turn this off in the BIOS, and you will see why later, although the Watchdog pretty much negated the need for any use of the CMOS reset jumper during this entire review.
Memory options are minimal on this screen (timings are controlled from another page) but you can set the memory to 400, 533 or Automatic. It's nice to see that Albatron allow you to not only lock the PCI frequency at 33MHz, but also the PCIe frequency at 100MHz. Voltage options are in the lower half of the page, and we can adjust DDR, Northbridge and CPU Voltage. Another nice touch here, Albatron list the default CPU voltage above the CPU voltage setting allowing you to instantly see how far above the default you are. CPU voltage is chosen from a menu and goes all the way up to 1.58v. DDR and NB voltage can be increased as well, although the choices are limited to applying an extra +0.3 and +0.2 respectively.
Memory options go more in depth on the Advanced Chipset Features page, allowing you to set memory options such as CAS Latency or the RAS Precharge either manually or by SPD.
The HW Monitor page displays the current voltages and temperatures, and allows you to engage the Smart CPUFAN Temperature.
Test Setup
Albatron PX925X Pro, Pentium 540 (3.2GHz), ASUS Star Ice Cooler, 2x512 Kingston HyperX PC2-5300, Albatron Trinity PC6600GT Graphics, 2x Maxtor SATA150 80GB, 1x Maxtor PATA 160GB, Windows SP2
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.
NEXT
