Albatron PX865PE Lite Pro i848P

Reviews: Hardware

Motherboards | Power Supplies | Memory | Systems | Video Cards

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Nicholas Hart
Kurtis
Albatron
May. 14, 2004

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Board Layout and Features

Being called PX865PE Lite Pro you would assume that this is an 865 chipset board. You would be assuming wrong however, it is actually an 848P. What's the difference? Not much actually. The 848P is simply a stripped down version of the 865. It does not support dual channel memory and has a max of 2GB of RAM as opposed to 4GB on the 865. Aside from those differences, their specifications are the same.

The board is built on a blue PCB with mostly white connectors. The primary IDE connector is a purple color and the AGP port is blue. The AGP port also accommodates a nice slider mechanism to retain the video card. Having seen way too many boards with a capacitor nudged right up against the standard AGP retaining mechanism, this slider is much appreciated. It is very easy to engage/disengage and holds a video card solidly in place.

The south-bridge of the PX865PE Lite Pro is the 82801EB model. The main significance of this being that the two SATA ports cannot be run in RAID mode. The board has onboard sound via AC97 and a RealTek codec and also incorporates a 3Com 3C910 10/100 onboard LAN controller. Some would decry the lack of RAID or gigabit Ethernet, but remember that at about $80 street price, this is a decently equipped board.

The rear panel has ports for audio connections as well as a game port connector. There is a parallel port and, a rarity these days, two com ports. There is also the standard PS2 connections for keyboard mouse, the LAN connector and two USB 2.0 connectors.

While installing this board I ran into an issue. The board is about one inch short of being full ATX depth. The third row of standoffs that would typically support a full ATX board cannot be used. This leaves about two inches of board hanging without support. Since the IDE, ATX-Power and DIMM slots are all located on that section of "hanging' board, this scared me a little. With the board secured in all possible mounting holes, I began plugging connectors in. The lack of support and the force needed to seat some of these connectors made the board sag quite a bit. The same is true of trying to remove connectors. There is much more flex than I would ever like to see and I worry that frequent cable swapping could cause damage.

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Page 2 of 10

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: Board Layout / Features
Page 3: Accessories / Extras
Page 4: BIOS
Page 5: Test System / Benchmarks
Page 6: Benchmarks: PCMark04 / Aquamark 03
Page 7: Benchmarks: Aida32 / Sandra 04
Page 8: Benchmarks: SpecViewPerf 7.1 / ScienceMark 2.0
Page 9: Benchmarks: Winbench 99 / UT2k3
Page 10: Overclocking / Conclusion

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2 User Comments

1 - Posted by EmoMakesMeCry on May 16, 2004 - 12:48 pm

i have an Albatron 865PE Pro, not the lite variant, and i had a bit of a problem with it.

when i bought it with a processor i got a great deal on it so i figured, why not? but i also bought a SATA hard drive to use as my one and only drive since the board had the support for it. bad news when i put my machine together...the board's SATA ports wouldn't work. so i snooped around online looking for answers and guess what?....the board needed a bios update for the SATA ports to be functional...

makes me wish i had stuck with Abit like i had intended to.

but i must say, my albatron is excellent for overclocking.

2 - Posted by Nick on May 17, 2004 - 11:17 am

I had the same problem, although I won't say the SATA ports 'didn't work', I simply couldnt boot. I could see them in the bios, but when I had the system set to enhanced, it wouldnt boot. Leaving the system in legacy mode (as for linux or older OS's) the system would boot.

Same as you though, upgrade the bios and it works fine. A little too fine for an $80 board ;) I can honestly say I was surprised at how well the board worked being so cheap compared to the boards I was comparing it too.

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