Albatron's PX875 Pro Motherboard
Power, Performance, and Good Looks

By: Jeff Bouton
February 5, 2004



HotHardware Test Systems
Intel All The Way


Albatron PX875 Pro Motherboard
Abit AI7 865PE Motherboard

BFG Asylum GeForce FX 5700 Ultra 128MB

Pentium 4-C @ 2.4GHz

512MB Kingston HyperX PC3500 DDR-RAM

Western Digital 30GB ATA-100 7200RPM Hard Drive

Creative 52X CD-ROM

Windows XP Pro SP-1

DirectX 9.0b

NVIDIA Forceware v53.03

 

SiSoft Sandra Professional 4

To get things started, we loaded SiSoft Sandra Professional 4 and ran several of the more common modules, such as the CPU, Multimedia, and Memory tests.  First we ran each test at the default 2.4GHz processor speed and then with the FSB set for 260MHz.
 

CPU @ 2.4GHz.
Multimedia @ 2.4GHz.
Memory @ 400MHz.

 

CPU @ 3.12GHz.
Multimedia @ 3.12GHz.
Memory @ 416MHz.

 

There is nothing too out of the ordinary with the stock numbers we see here.  At default speeds, the Albatron PX875 Pro ranked inline with the reference i875P system.  Once we increased the FSB to 260MHz and the memory to 416MHz, we saw a major improvement in performance.  Even with the memory set to 1.6x FSB we saw a nice gain in memory bandwidth and the CPU and MM scores clearly improved, coming quite close to matching those of the 3.2GHz reference system.  As we progress in this review, we'll demonstrate what these gains can yield in more real world type tests.
 

 

FutureMark's PCMark 2004 Pro & 3DMark03
FutureMark's Latest

One of the newest all-in-one utilities for gauging a system's performance is PCMark2004Pro.  This replaces PCMark2002Pro that has been a staple in just about every motherboard review we've done since it was released.  The latest version adds some new modules as well as issuing a total score that can be broken down into 4 modules; CPU, Memory, Graphics and Hard Drive.  From here on in we will compare the results of the PX875 Pro to an i865PE based board to see if the board that officially supports PAT has any real performance advantage over the one with "Game Accelerator" features.

In all of the tests the two boards were neck-in-neck with the Albatron model maintaining a slight edge over the i865PE comparison board.  What was more impressive is how the CPU, Memory and Total scores surged when we overclocked the system  We saw significant gains across the board, ranging from 21% in Total score to gains of 28% and 24% with CPU and Memory scores respectively.  Clearly, whether overclocked or not, the PX875 Pro matched up well with our Pentium 4-C @ 2.4GHz, yielding solid scores throughout the tests.

Gaming, The Winstones and Final Words