Overclocker Cafe - Albatron PX 875P Pro

Albatron PX 875P Pro Mainboard

Board Layout

Sporting the signature blue colored PCB that Albatron favors, the PX875P Pro is anything but cluttered. Granted, I'm used to looking at my ABIT IC7-Max3 with it's OTES cooling system, but still, this Albatron board is very easy to work with.

Starting with the socket, we see a row of transistors just above. While this may give you some pause about installing a large heatsink, don't worry. There is actually more than enough room without bumping into things.

Just below we see the Northbridge, which is cooled with a large gold passive heatsink. While I'm a proponent of active cooling, the size of the sink here should prove more than adequate.

There are four DIMM slots allowing for a maximum of 4GB of memory to be installed. Color coded using green and purple, they make it easy to use the dual channel memory kits without having to check the manual.

Also visible, are two IDE channels and the ATX 20 pin power connector. IDE channel one is red while white is for channel two. The floppy connector is located at the bottom of the board, just below the Southbridge and SATA connections.

The AGP slot has one of those retaining clips on it to prevent the video card from getting up and walking away while you're transporting it to you favorite LAN party.

Granted, most if not all cases have either screws or brackets to keep the expansion cards in place, but there is nothing wrong with redundancy when we're talking about a $200-$500 video card.

The rear I/O ports are pretty standard with a couple of exceptions. The first being that Albatron has included a standard game port for all those people who still have their old joysticks (like Dean).

Also notice the two serial ports here. Most of the newer motherboards are only sporting one serial port and using the space for either extra USB ports or the digital SPDIF ports for the audio. This struck me as rather unusual since serial devices are definitely old news. I say get rid of them all together. Also worth mentioning is the lack of FireWire support on this board. While I may not use any FireWire devices, it struck me as odd that they wouldn't integrate something that has become almost standard on this board.

BACK NEXT