The Springdale Showdown
Which board should you "spring" for?

Brought to you by Robert Maloney
July 10, 2003

The Albatron 865PE Pro II Motherboard:

Albatron has done a nice job with the 865PE Pro II, aesthetically, but we had a few gripes about the placement of some components.  The board comes on a blue PCB (it looks more like teal in these photos) that matches well with other blue third-party cards, and sets off the colored slots and ports well.  The IDE 1 and 2 ports are near the DIMM slots, with the two yellow ports used for IDE RAID placed in the corner, perpendicular to the edge.  The floppy connector, however, is all the way up by the fifth PCI slot, which could cause problems in taller cases.  It also requires some tricky placement of the floppy cable over cards and other cables.  Any way you slice it, it's not an optimal placement.  The ATX connections were in good and not-so-good spots.  The 20-pin connector was fine, placed near the IDE ports.  However, the 5V ATX header was nestled in between the power array, the cable from the fan over the North Bridge and the CPU bracket.  It was a tight squeeze to get it plugged in once everything else was connected.

Three of the main chips lie right next to each other by the IDE ports, these being the Promise PDC20276 RAID controller, and the VIA VT6407 LAN and VT1720 Envy PT audio controller.  As we have covered in the past (like last week or so) the Envy 24PT, with its 8-Channel output, is one of the best audio solutions out there right now.  For most purposes, an add-in audio card will not be a necessity here, unless gaming is your top priority.  Albatron sticks with the CSA (Communication Streaming Architecture)  treatment for the onboard Ethernet, one of the only boards in this roundup to actually do so.  Basically, this takes the load off of the PCI bus, and provides a direct channel to the North Bridge for LAN traffic.  The addition of the Promise RAID controller gives you the option of either using SATA RAID from the ICH5R South Bridge, or PATA RAID with Promise controller.  This will aid people who are upgrading from current systems with IDE RAID configurations, who aren't about to go out and buy another two hard drives.  The North Bridge is actively cooled using a copper-based heatsink with a custom lit fan shown in one of the pictures above.  This will appeal to the case-mod crowd and in first-hand experience it really does look great.

THE BUNDLE:

Albatron has included a full set of items in the bundle, somewhat reminiscent of MSI's offerings.  There was a full manual for the motherboard and another guide for just the Promise RAID setup.  The drivers CD was just that - drivers for each of the on-board components and the 865PE chipset.  There weren't any hardware related applications usually found on the CD, but an extra CD with InterVideo's WinCinema Pro does have a full version of WinDVD 4 on it, assuming you have a DVD-ROM in your setup.  Three IDE cables are included, two of which were colored yellow to match the RAID IDE ports.  A SATA cable and SATA power cable were also included.    To supplement the connections on the rear of the board, four brackets were found in the box, one each for FireWire, USB 2.0/1.1, and S/PDIF audio ports, as well as an additional COM port and a Game/MIDI port.  Throw in an additional SATA interface and power cable to support the SATA RAID, and it would really be complete.

Specifications & Features of The Albatron 865PE Pro II Only the best features allowed

The BIOS:

The Albatron 865PE Pro II uses the Award BIOS we are familiar with.  Similar to the update on the Abit IS7-G, a BIOS revision for this Albatron board was supposed to increase performance.  Take a quick look at the second and third screen shots above, and you will notice three items that were added under the AGP aperture size.  There were new settings for Memory Performance and Extreme Timings, as well as an overclocked memory stability setting.  While 'Memory Performance' may be straightforward, little information is given on what 'Extreme 'Timings' equates to.  We hedged our bets, and set both of these to 'Enabled'.  Individual memory timings are also set here.  To get the RAM to 2-2-5-2 we used manual settings.  The rest of the BIOS was mostly standard fare.  In the PC Health section, there are readouts for the System and CPU temperatures, fan speeds, and VCore, Power Supply rails, and battery voltages.  Finally, the frequency/voltage section allows for changing the front side bus from 200Mhz to 333MHz, choosing a CPU/DRAM ratio, and raising the voltages for the CPU, DRAM, and AGP.  Unfortunately, the tame settings for the CPU voltages only go so far as 1.6V, which may hold some users back.  The only problems we noted with our setup was that on a warm boot, we often lost the second IDE channel that the CD-ROM was on, however, the drive was still present in Windows.  Hyper-Threading was disabled by default, which was odd since that should be a major selling point of the board/CPU combo.  We also ran into some lockups when using 3DMark 2001 as a benchmark, even at normal FSB speeds.  We couldn't determine whether this was an issue with the new BIOS, or simply a problem with our 3DMark installation, as no other tests had any problems.

Overclocking: Albatron 865PE Pro II Fly like an Eagle, I mean Albatross

STOCK CPU SPEED 2.40GHz P4

CPU OVERCLOCKED TO 3.24GHz (12 X 270MHz)

 
Since we already had a good idea of the range we should be looking for when overclocking our particular CPU, we switched to a 5:4 ratio for the RAM and went immediately up to 260MHz for the FSB.  At this point, we had the CPU VCore up to its maximum value of 1.6V.  We were able to get a bit further, up to 270MHz, but could not get any higher than that.  The RAM was clocked at 432MHz at this point, and we even tried to go to a 3:2 ratio to isolate the RAM speed from the picture, but still could not get back into Windows.  We had to "settle" for a 270MHz FSB as both the high point and "sweet spot" for overclocking of the 865PE Pro II.  In the next BIOS revision, it would be nice to see Albatron raise the maximum CPU voltage setting just a bit

Coming up, the Asus P4P800 Deluxe