The layout of the PX915P Pro is generally pretty good, if a little tight in some spots. The ATX 12V connector is in a good spot at the top right of the board, and underneath it is the FDC, which is fortunately not at the bottom of the board under the PCI slots as it is on many other Albatron motherboards. Below that, and this is really strange, is the board’s single IDE controller. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen another board having just one of these. That’s not to say storage options are limited, as there are two Raid IDE channels powered by an ITE IT812F chip, as well as 4 SATA ports. Optical drives will be limited though, as a single IDE channel means a maximum of two, at least until SATA optical drives are more common. Something to keep in mind if you have more than two IDE CD\DVD drives.
Moving on, you can see the 775 “clamshell” socket takes up most of the top-middle portion of the board. Surrounding capacitors are fortunately kept short, so even big heat sinks shouldn’t have a problem on this board. A small, attractive gold passive sink sits on the 915P Northbridge. Below that is the PCIe x16 graphics card slot, and two PCIe x1 slots. The sink on the ICH6 Southbridge seems like it would clear these slots without issue, but the position of the USB headers fairly close to the slots makes me a bit nervous. I don’t have any PCIe cards to actually test this, however.
Around back are the usual PS\2 keyboard and mouse ports, a single Com and printer port, ports for 6ch audio (but no optical or digital audio in\out) 4 USB ports, and dual Lan, with a VIA VT6105 handling 10\100Mbit duties and a Marvell MV8001 handling 1Gbit Lan, which is an unusual feature on this class of board, and was nice to see here. On to the bios.
