Market Survey, Part 1: A Comparison Of The Latest Pentium 4 Motherboards

Albatron PX925XE Pro-R (Intel 925XE)

Albatron went with a highly contrasting color scheme for its slots, making mix-ups nearly impossible.

Board revision: ?

BIOS version: 1.06 (November 11, 2004)

Albatron offers six different models for socket 775, so we decided to go with the XE version, due to its good overclockability. Like Abit's board, the PX925XE at first starts up with a CAS latency of 4 clock cycles; CL3 can be set in the BIOS afterwards, for a solid memory performance improvement of 100 MB/s. Both configuration and the test run of our benchmark suite went off without any problems, just as they should.

We only encountered a bit of difficulty with our initial overclocking attempts on this board. We experienced crashes upon boot up, and some periodic instability. We were able to take care of this entirely, however, by raising the chipset and memory voltage by 0.1 V. After that change, the benchmarks with FSB1066 ran to our complete satisfaction. The additional performance obtained from our overclocking attempt was just a bit limited, although that is certainly not Albatron's fault.

Albatron counters the board's lack of IDE capability by including an ITE chip with two UltraATA/133 channels. The included package contents are average; we would have liked to have seen some software for monitoring voltage and temperature in Windows.

The Albatron board exhibited a standard connection setup.