The majority of new Albatron motherboards are designed to cater well for the enthusiasts and overclockers alike. However the PX915P-AGPe is appropriate for any purpose, whether that be for overclocking or basic office productivity use. That said it is very important to make these motherboards, such as the PX915P-AGPe, easy to work with. When building a computer the whole process can be a breeze providing you have a quality motherboard, case, cooling solution and so on.
The board design of the PX915P-AGPe is remarkably good and it is clear that Albatron have done their homework. Although everything on this motherboard does appear to be quite crammed, it all fits together very well without any conflictions at all. Layout wise there is little that I would change as everything seems to be fairly well placed and easy to access. There are no common design flaws present, such as the PCIe x16/AGP confliction with the DIMM slots. The CPU socket is clear of all components and will allow for the installation of much larger heatsinks.
The placement of the IDE ATA133 ports and Serial ATA150 ports is nicely done. All these storage connectors are located towards the bottom right hand corner of the board. This is quite a good location for such connectors, given that hard drives are generally installed into the lower section of the case. All connectors are placed vertically and are placed neatly on the board. The BIOS chip is located in front of the secondary IDE port, placing it in the bottom right hand corner of the board. This is again excellent placement, making access to this chip very easy.
The Northbridge chip is placed quite closely between the CPU Socket and the PCIe x16 port, though I did not find any problems with this arrangement. The i915P Northbridge chip is cooled via a large gold heatsink labeled Albatron. The Southbridge chips also features a cool looking gold heatsink. The appearance of the PX915P-AGPe is much like that of any Gigabyte motherboard, in the sense that it is nice and colorful. The board boasts a range of color coded connectors making the installation process a breeze.
The I/O panel of the PX915P-AGPe features a number of connections ranging from USB ports to Serial outputs. There are a total of six audio jacks, four USB 2.0 ports, two RJ45 Ethernet ports along with the standard PS/2 and Parallel ports. Unfortunately, there are some missing features on the I/O panel such as Firewire and S/PDIF. Sadly the board does not offer any kind of Firewire support, which is a real downer. Overall, the board design is quite good and most aspects of the design appear to have a great deal of thought behind them.
Albatron K8X890 Pro II K8T890 Motherboard Review Launched (2005-02-19)