Albatron, and it is quite simply the finest board I have eve... />
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Home » Reviews » Motherboards » Albatron PX845G Pro II Motherboard
Albatron PX845G Pro II Motherboard

Category : Motherboards
Manufacturer : Albatron

Posted by: Ben on 2002-07-31


Overclocking

Although the benchmarks were conducted using a Pentium 4 2.53Ghz, naturally for obtaining insane FSB speeds this chip is not ideal. For that reason I stuck in a Pentium 4 1.6A that has been verified up to 190FSB on an Abit BD7 II (with a 120mm fan cooling the northbridge). Naturally some extreme cooling was employed to reach this (details coming soon), but suffice to say the words vapo and chill were involved =). By installing the Albatron in the vapochill, a solid 185MHz FSB (2960MHz) was achievable without any extra cooling on the motherboard. Once a 40mm papst chipset cooler was bolted on, 190MHz was no problem, at which point I think the chip gives up. Still, an overclock of 1440MHz is pretty damn good, and at that speed the PX845G's memory benches were spanking even RAMBUS 1066 by a huge margin. This is a truly astonishing overclocking result, and Albatron should be commended for making such a stable board. Overclocking options are available aplenty, and there is certainly nothing missing from Albatron's Award / Phoenix hybrid BIOS. Voltage can be adjusted up to a rather dangerous (with air cooling at least) 1.85V, DDR Voltage can be adjusted to 2.8V, AGP Voltage is adjustable also. FSB is adjustable to 248MHz, and most importantly, the AGP and PCI buses can be LOCKED IN SPEC at 66/33 respectively.


Naturally all the overclocking options in the world will go to waste if the Albatron lacks some of the other tweaking options. Fortunately DDR settings can be fine-tuned, with CAS Latency (which can be set to 1,5!!!), Active to Precharge, RAS to CAS and RAS Precharge all adjustable. Also available is a "Turbo" setting which increases RAM performance considerably, if you can get it to run. Even my best memory stick could not run at "turbo" at 133MHz - clearly a setting for future, better modules. The memory divider can either be set at 1.5x, 2.0x or 2.5x the system FSB. (I.e, at 2.5x, a 133MHz FSB would have memory running at the PC2700 standard of 333MHz.)

All of the on-board functions can be disabled if you prefer to use your own devices, and we have seen boards in the past that only overclock with certain features switched off. Not so the Albatron, the 190MHz was obtained with all features except on-board video turned on.

One of the nice features of the Albatron is that during the POST sequence the core voltage, CPU speed, memory speed and memory voltage is displayed, as well as their respective defaults. This is handy if you want to stop the boot up if you have accidentally set things to insane levels.

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