Albatron PX865PE Lite Pro i848P

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Nicholas Hart
Kurtis
Albatron
May. 14, 2004

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Extras

I hate to say the "B' word but I'm going to again: budget. This is a budget board and there simply aren't many extras. There are two flat ATA-100 ribbon cables, a floppy cable, one SATA cable and a 4-pin-molex to SATA-power converter.

You also get a PCI-bracket with four USB 2.0 ports to make use of the two onboard USB headers and a sticker for the inside of the case that details the locations and details of important jumpers on the board. Call me strange, but I like these stickers. It makes it very handy if you are monkeying around in your case adding a front panel connector or trying to clear CMOS. Not that you will need to clear CMOS with this board's "WatchDog Timer" feature, but that"s best left for the Overclocking section and I will cover it there.

For instructions we have a "DIY Installation Guide' (AKA quick install) and the manual itself. The manual is pretty large, but that is mostly due to the fact that it contains instructions in four different languages. There are about 50 pages dedicated to the English section and 22 of those are just BIOS settings. Each BIOS option has a small description to give you an idea of what you are doing when you fiddle with settings. The rest of the manual covers the board components, jumper block configuration and a small troubleshooting guide. There are plenty of pictures and drawings to make installation a snap.

Finally we have the driver CD containing motherboard drivers and some rather outdated software; namely Trend PC-Cilin 2002 and Microsoft DirectX 9.0a. I strongly recommend against installing the bundled DirectX software and instead download the 9.0b version which incorporates some performance and security fixes. Normally I would download the latest drivers from the manufacturer website, but I was surprised to find that the version on the CD were the same as on the site. While these drivers worked fine and I had no issues installing them, I am sure they are out of date. For example, the chipset INF software on the Albatron site is version 5.0.2.1002 yet the Intel support site has version 5.1.0.1008 available for the 848p chipset.

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Page 3 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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