The board is decked out in Albatron’s traditional blue color scheme. For the most part, the layout is fairly well executed. The main ATX power connector is near the top right of the board, which should help keep the large and unwieldy power cable out of the way of the ram and heatsink. Unfortunately, the ATX +12V connector is again located on the left side of the board, so you will need to rout the ATX +12V cable around the HSF, which can be annoying.
Placement of the primary and secondary IDE ports is critical, and the PX865 does well in this regard. They are placed high enough that the included IDE cables shouldn’t have a problem reaching to the top 5.25” bays of your case if need be.
Unfortunately, space around the ZIF socket is in very short supply. A row of caps is close to the left side of the ZIF socket, and the passive Northbridge sink is very close to the bottom. MCX-4000 and SLK-900 users may be in trouble here. The bottom of the Northbridge sink is also very close to the AGP slot, which may cause issues with large video card coolers such as Leadtek’s wrap-around cooler or Zalman’s heat pipe system.
The cause of most of the board’s space issues is the placement of the floppy connector, located at the bottom of the board, underneath the PCI slots. I really can’t understand the reason for putting it there. I don’t even have a floppy drive (I find a 512mb USB2 pen drive to be much more efficient than roughly 370 floppy disks), but the FDC still forces all of the PCI slots and AGP slot forward, putting them all to close too the Northbridge, and the Northbridge too close to the ZIF socket. Note to Albatron: please put the FDC back on the right side of the board where it was on the PX845PE. I’m looking forward to the time when floppy controllers go the way of ISA slots.
