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Albatron PX915P Pro


Date
: 09/2/04 – 05:41:00 AM

Author
:

Category
: Motherboard

Page 1 : Introduction

Manufacturer:
Albatron

Price:
NA

The Albatron we know today had its beginnings in 2002 and has since been a recognizable name in the motherboard and video card market. That's not to say that those are the only markets they cater to, but these are the primary areas that concern the community and us today.

With the recent introduction of AMD's socket 939 platform and Intel's socket 775 platform things have really just begun to heat up. While the socket 939 platform was more of an evolutionary direction for AMDs previous sockets, the Intel socket 775 platform brings with it quite a few new and innovative parts. PCI Express is probably the greatest of these innovations and will show its benefits in performance over time, but not today.

What we have today is
Albatron's PX915P Pro
motherboard. This will be our first look at Intel's new platform and so our comparisons in performance will be limited until we gather more and more samples. In this review we will focus on evaluating the features, overclocking, and performance of the PX915P motherboard. The video card, Albatron's PCX5750, will be featured in a seperate review with further gaming numbers in more stressful situations.

Page 2 : Package

The retail box of the PX915P Pro is holographic and decorated to fit the Mars name given to the board.

Inside this box are the motherboard, documentation, cables, an IO shield, and the driver CD. The documentation provided includes a manual for the motherboard, a manual for the RAID controller, a quick installation guide, and a socket 775 install overview. It seems Albatron has got things covered here.

Page 3 : Specifications

The following specifications were provided by Albatron:

A long list of specifications come with this motherboard and most of these are nothing uncommon, but being as this is a new chipset there are also some new technologies it is introducing. We'll get to those next.

Page 4 : Layout

The PX915P Pro has a typical layout consisting of SATA RAID, IDE RAID, and dual-channel DDR. There are however the noticable additions of PCI Express slots and the absence of a couple PCI slots and an AGP slot. Other than that the only noticable differences left are the new CPU socket and the lack of the plastic heatsink bracket of old. The metal lever and plate around the new socket make up what Intel calls the Socket Actuation Mechanism.

The 24-pin power connector is placed parallel to the memory banks, and where I tend to prefer it. Others may prefer it placed parallel to the PCI slots and on the top edge. Either way you need to route the cable so that it doesn't hinder the CPU coolers airflow. Both the Albatron PX915P Pro and Abit's IC7-G have similar comoponent placement.

The board has connections for Gb LAN, Mb LAN, 7-channel audio, four USB 2.0, parallel, serial, and PS/2.

Both bridges are only passively cooled and are held down with easy to remove clips. These new clips seem easier to remove than push-pins because there isn't a need to flip the board over, however this could pose problems for mounting 3rd party coolers that rely on those mounting holes. Inbetween the bridges and heatsinks there is a layer of thermal gum to help improve heat transfer.
In the shot below you can see the various integrated circuits that get the jobs done that aren't native to the southbridge. On the far right edge you can see the front audio, S/PDIF, and CD-IN connections that are used by the onboard audio.
The PX915P Pro supports up to 4 GB of DDR RAM accross four memory banks. In order for dual channel DDR to function memory needs to be paired according to the color coded banks.

The new socket takes all the pins that would usually be on the processor and places them onto the socket in what is called the Land Grid Array. This eliminates the risk of bending pins on the CPU itself, but now you have a whole motherboard and system to tear apart if a pin gets bent.

Page 5 : Features

Land Grid Array 775

Intel's new socket, LGA775 or simply Socket 775, is without a doubt the most controversial update present today. The reason for this controversy is the placement of the pins on the motherboard socket rather than on the processor. The longevity of this solution will be answered in time, but otherwise the new socket adds more pins required to attain more efficient use of power needed to raise clock frequencies. Another step taken with the new socket was improving the heat sink loading by use of the Socket Actuation Mechanism that is composed of the load plate and lever. This new addition to the socket provides the pressure required for electrical contact between processor and socket; a job no longer left to the HSF to perform.

PCI Express

One of the most long-awaited updates has come in the form of the PCI Express bus. Though the PCI Express shares the PCI name they have little in common. PCI Express differs from AGP/PCI in that it is a serial, point-to-point link – so no more bus sharing. Additionaly, PCI Express benefits motherboard makers as it is simpler to route serial lines than it is to route parallel lines which need to be equidistant. These benefits also provide the ability to scale higher in speed, though at the cost of lower bus utilization (less data is being sent per clock).

Overall the new bus is a large improvement and a single 1 x PCI Express slot offers up to 500 MB/s (250 MB/s each direction) compared to a 33 MHz PCI slots peak 132 MB/s. With those numbers it's easy to calculate the peak 8 GB/s (4 GB/s each direction) of a 16 x PCI Express slot which multiplies AGP 8x bandwidth, 2.1 GB/s, by nearly four times; a considerable improvement.

Intel High Definition Audio

Intel's latest audio specification, formerly codenamed Azalia, calls for support of 7.1 surround sound, Dolby Digital, and DTS. Audio codec support for 192 kHz quality, multiple streams, and better voice input for speech recognition and voice-over-IP. These improvements are part of Intel's digital home trend that has been a focal point at recent Intel Developer Conferences and are materializing today.

The
Albatron PX915P Pro
we're looking at today employs the Realtek ALC880 Audio Codec. The ALC880 is a 7.1 Channel High Definition Audio codec featuring four 24-bit two-channel DACs and three stereo 20-bit ADCs. The DACs feature a peak sampling frequency of 192 kHz and 100dB S/N ratio rivaling many add-in boards. This codec supports EAX 1.0 & 2.0, DirectSound 3D, A3D, I3DL2, and HRTF 3D. A quote taken from Realtek's site is found below and for further information on this codecs capabilities please refer to
here.

Page 6 : Installation

Being a new platform, I decided I'd check some of the documentation before jumping into things. Not only is there a new socket and heatsink install procedure, but the ATX power connector has been modified from 20 to 24 pins. No need to fear though because Intel has said that the 24 pin header is backwards compatible with the 20 pin connector.

Getting the board up and running was more tedious than usual for me. Posting seemed to take an abnormally long time compared to installs on previous boards. Upon my initial entry into the BIOS I was less than thrilled to see a similar layout and navigation typical of retail systems (for lack of a better comparison); not what I was use to seeing. Luckily there are all the usual tweaking options allowing voltage, memory timing, and front side bus adjustments.

Installed onto a PATA setup I put the boot drive onto the RAID controller and left the optical drive on it's own seperate channel so not to degrade performance. After setting up Windows and loading the chipset and LAN drivers from the included disk, things proceeded fine and all the updates were installed. With all the updates in place I installed the audio drivers and video drivers. The audio software has a basic look to it that would look nearly perfect with some added polish to fonts and some of the images, but the functionality is what counts.

The onboard Realtek audio allows you to adjust many settings ranging from speaker connectivity to environmental audio effects. From these views the onboard solution appears nearly as good as an add-in board.

Page 7 : BIOS & Overclocking

The PX915P Pro uses a Phoenix-Award BIOS. The BIOS provides all the options you'd come to expect from an enthusiast motherboard offering all the expected voltage tweaks and frequency adjustments. You can get a better look at some of the individual screens below.

The PX915P Pro allows manual adjustment of memory timings from 2-2-2-4 up to 3-5-5-15 which are a larger range than I'm use to seeing with the Abit IC7-G. The benefit of this is that the looser the timings the better your chance for increasing the frequency on the memory.
The FSB adjustments are available in 1 MHz increments from 200 MHz to 300 MHz. Memory voltage is adjustable up to .4 V over the memory's default voltage, northbridge voltage is adjustable up to .3 V above default voltage, and core voltage is adjustable from .850 V to 1.6 V. There is no adjustment available for the PCI-E voltage. Memory can be set to run in Auto, 1:1, or a 400:333 (FSB:Mem) ratio.

Overclocking the 2.8 GHz Prescott on the PX915P Pro saw average results. We were able to achieve a stable 3.22 GHz frequency throughout testing and were able to post at speeds upwards of 3.4 GHz though Windows was unstable in such cases. With proper cooling these numbers would probably be well within reach, however even at stock temps the Prescott core runs hotter than most with temperatures ranging in the high 50's and up into the 60's Celcius at stock setting.

Page 8 : Testing

For our tests we included both the 3.01 GHz and 3.22 GHz overclocked results with memory set to a 1:1 ratio. For comparison, the reference system was tested with a 2.4C Northwood clocked at 3.0 GHz, 250 MHz FSB, and with memory set to a 5:4 ratio.

The suite of benchmarks used consisted of PCMark 2004, ScienceMark 2, SiSoft Sandra 2004, Super Pi, Comanche 4, and Quake 3 Arena. PCMark 2004 provides tests in such situations as encoding, compression, decompression, virus scanning, and content creation which provide a number for comparing system-wide performance levels. ScienceMark 2 and Super Pi provide us with stressful mathematical applications to compare CPU, system, and memory performance between systems. SiSoft Sandra 2004 is a common benchmark used for testing memory bandwidth and performance. Comanche 4 is a benchmark that is very CPU bound benchmark good for evaluating system performance in a real world game environment. Quake 3 Arena in this case was tested at 640×480 to minimize graphic card dependancy and place more load on the systems CPU, memory, and chipset for these comparisons in a real world gaming environment.

The tests were conducted using the following systems:

And strictly for comparisons sake we have a socket 478 system to compare numbers to:

Judging by the graphs it appears that at these speeds the Prescott core's performance scales linearly with clock speed. Clock for clock the Northwood has typically proven faster and paired with a faster FSB these results show no different. In fact, if you have a 2.4C and have it heavily overclocked then there is no reason at all to consider upgrading if you're seeking further performance. Otherwise, it would make sense to upgrade to a platform such as LGA 775 that will continue to have a future for some time to come.

The odd man out in these graphs appears to be Super Pi where only the stock 2.8 GHz Prescott didn't manage to overtake the 3.0 GHz Northwood that was running on a 250 MHz FSB. With the reference setup running RAM at 200 MHz this may be the cause of such results as we know that Super Pi can be extremely sensitive towards memory speed/timings.

Testing the audio out I played some music and UT2004 matches with the audio hooked up to 6-channel direct using Logitech Z-680 speakers. The results were surprisingly good and provided great sounding music with or without adjustments in the software equalizer. Positional audio too was very good and after playing a bit with the onboard audio I can say that it will suffice for the majority of people much the same as how nVidia's SoundStorm did.

Page 9 : Conclusion

The
Albatron PX915P
proves a worthy solution that is both affordable and a solid performer for anyone looking to migrate to the new PCI Express/LGA 775 platform. The features provided in this solution are numerous and give the enthusiast options for improving the performance of their stock setup through added tweaking. Overall though I found this board pretty easy to use and it provided me with all the options I would expect to have in a modern motherboard.

Advantages:

Affordable
PCI-Express
Dual LAN
Good onboard audio
Solid upgrade paths

Disadvantages:

Expensive platform for initial entry
Limited video card choices initially
No active cooling on northbridge

I'd like to give our thanks to Albatron for supplying the motherboard and video card to make this review possible.