Albatron PX865PE Pro Mainboard Review: the First i865PE Based Mainboard in Our Lab

by Ilya Gavrichenkov
05/19/2003 | 02:49 AM

Today we can say with absolute certainty that dual-channel DDR SDRAM has finally become a major memory type for Pentium 4 platforms. Since Intel has given up Rambus memory and speeded up the Pentium 4 processor bus to 800MHz, it appears now that only two 64bit DDR SDRAM channels can ensure sufficient memory subsystem bandwidth for a high-performance system.

The introduction of dual-channel DDR SDRAM started last year already, when i7205 chipset appeared. This chipset targeted for high-performance workstations supported dual-channel DDR266 SDRAM and allowed using processors with 400MHz or 533MHz bus frequency. At that time it was more than enough. However, time kept going: today the market offers faster processors with 800MHz bus. Specifically for these CPUs Intel launched new i875P chipset supporting faster bus and two DDR400 SDRAM channels. As a result, the bus between the CPU and the memory now boasts 6.4GB/sec bandwidth, which speeded up systems built with Intel processors quite tangibly. However, i875P features one very serious drawback: it’s the price. Mainboards based on i875P cost more than $200 today, which automatically positions this chipset as a solution for the Top End high-performance systems. And the ordinary mainstream computers are still built on the chipsets from i845 family working with single-channel DDR333 SDRAM and featuring no official support for the new 800MHz bus. However, very soon this situation should change for the better. In the nearest future, to be more exact on May 21 Intel is going to announce one more dual-channel chipset aka i865 with 800MHz bus support, which will replace the i845 chipset family. It will mean that very soon 800MHz bus will become a mainstream feature. Moreover, it also means that Intel will soon start selling not very expensive processors with 800MHz bus support and working frequencies starting from 2.4GHz, as well as low-cost mainboards for them.

This way, the new upcoming i865 chipset (new chipset family, to be more exact) also known under Springdale codename should replace the popular i845 family bringing Pentium 4 platforms performance to a completely new level. Although there are still a few days left before the official announcement of the i865, the first mainboards based on it are already selling. Today we are going to take a closer look at one of the first mainboards based on the new chipset and to evaluate the performance growth expected from the newcomer.

Intel 865PE vs. Intel 875P

At first we would like to make a few things clear about the differences between the today’s Intel chipsets supporting 800MHz bus. The first i875P chipset announced about a month ago together with Pentium 4 3.0GHz already supported dual-channel DDR400 SDRAM and 800MHz bus. Formally, the new i865PE hardly differs from i875PE in terms of its features set, however, it costs much less: only $34 against $50. Why do two so similar chipsets cost so differently? It looks as if product positioning and marketing are the two primary reasons. If i875P is targeted for high-performance systems, then i865PE is a regular mainstream product for the mass systems. However, Intel’s engineers had to make sure that this price difference is also backed up by some specifications differences. This difference in specs is the PAT technology support and the opportunity to use ECC memory with i875P. i865PE doesn’t have any of those.

PAT Technology (Performance Acceleration Technology) makes i875P based systems run about 2-5% faster than similar systems on i865PE. i875P owes this advantage to optimized work with the memory subsystem. Due to the fact that i875P is built of “fast” silicon with lower signal spreading time, Intel engineers managed to give up additional synchronization buffers when accessing the system memory. As a result, i875P saves up to two processor clock cycles when working with the memory: one during memory request processing by the CPU and one on selecting the DRAM chip.

All other features of the i875 and i865 chipsets are very similar. Therefore, you will hardly be surprised to find out that they are both produced from the same dies. However, i865 doesn’t support PAT, because Intel decided to “cut” a bit of the performance off the cheaper solution. The thing is that the chipset yields during i865 and i875 production are quite high. However, only a small part of these chips allows implementing PAT, because the proper functioning of this technology depends a lot on the silicon quality and a number of other factors. So, after the production stage of the new generation dual-channel chipsets is complete, Intel tests them to find out how well they run with 800MHz bus. Those chipsets, which prove highly stable throughout all the tests and allow enabling PAT faultlessly, become i875. However, they are not very numerous that is why they cost much more. All other chips that stand the tests without PAT technology but using the standard memory access algorithms, become i865.

This way, i875 and i865 are based on the same core, however PAT technology is blocked in i865, and it is impossible to enable, no way. Moreover, these chipsets have different packaging, which are not pin compatible. i875 North Bridge features 1005 pins while the North Bridge of i865 – 932 pins only. The explanation is very simple: i865 has no pins laid out responsible for ECC support.

Summing up everything said above we would like to make up a list of i865PE features:

• Supports Pentium 4 processors including upcoming Prescott processors with 400MHz, 533MHz and 800MHz processor bus;
• Supports AGP 8x for high-performance graphics cards;
• Two DDR266/DDR333/DDR400 SDRAM channels, supports up to 4 DIMM slots, no ECC support;
• CSA – separate bus for Gigabit Ethernet controllers;
• Input/Output functions are implemented in the ICH5 South Bridge supporting 8 USB 2.0 ports, 2 SerialATA ports and software RAID in case of ICH5-R.

We would also like to point out that unlike i875, the new i865 family will include not only the above described i865PE solution. There will also be an integrated version aka i865GE and a “lite” version without 800MHz bus support aka i865P. These two chipsets will also be made of the same silicon dies as i875P. That is why you should remember that i865P is based on the worst quality dies, which do not ensure acceptable stability when working with 800MHz bus.

Mainboard Specifications

Now that we have already discussed the peculiarities of the i865PE chipset, let’s pass over to the mainboard based on it, which we managed to get hold of. This products is Albatron PX865PE Pro.

Now let’s take a closer look at the specifications of this product:

As you can notice, Albatron PX865PE Pro boasts all basic features, which you can expect from the i865PE based solution. Albatron is also going to offer two more boards based on the same chipset. They will be PX865PE, which is absolutely the same as PX865PE Pro, but without the network controller onboard, and Albatron PX865PE Pro II, which will be the top model in the family. Albatron is not going to release mainboards on i875P, because the price of the chipset is too high, that is why the top model in the family, Albatron PX865PE Pro II, will also boast a lot of additional features: Gigabit CSA Ethernet controller, 8-channel sound chip, ATA?133 RAID controller, IEEE1394 controller and a few more additional technologies. The mainboard we are going to review today doesn’t have all this horn of plenty, which makes the price of this product more than moderate: $110.

The package of Albatron PX865PE Pro includes not too much stuff. The mainboard is shipped together with a CD-disk with the drivers, a set of FDDM IDE and SerialATA cables, and a bracket for the case rear panel with additional 4 USB 2.0 ports.

Closer Look: Albatron PX865PE Pro Features

Albatron PX865PE Pro feature list is mostly determined by the features of the i865PE chipset. Of course, the mainboard supports Pentium 4 processors with 400MHz, 533MHz or 800MHz bus frequency, with or without Hyper-Threading technology. The mainboard owes this to the chipset only. By the way, we would like to mention that i875P chipset doesn’t support Celeron CPUs and Pentium 4 CPUs with 400MHz bus, because the market positioning for this chipset and products based on it is different: it is targeted for high-performance systems only.

As for the memory, Albatron PX865PE Pro works with single-channel or dual-channel DDR SDRAM of various speeds. Four DDR DIMM slots are located in pairs: two slots for one channel and two slots for another one. If the memory modules are installed in pairs, you can use dual-channel mode. Besides, you should also remember a few important things, which will ensure that your mainboard (and any other i865 or i875 mainboard) works with the dual-channel memory providing maximum performance. First, the memory slots assigned to different channels should be used symmetrically, i.e. if you want to have your memory work in dual-channel mode use two or four memory modules. Second, you should make sure that the memory modules used for different channels are of the same capacity and feature the same number of memory banks. Although you needn’t necessarily have absolutely identical modules. The chipset can work with different memory modules in dual-channel mode. In this case you should set the memory timings according to the slowest module. Still, if you are longing to squeeze the maximum out of your system, use identical memory modules: this will guarantee success. However, even if you fail to use dual-channel mode for some reason, don’t give way to despair: mainboards based on i865PE can work perfectly well with a single memory channel, though this will definitely make the system performance somewhat lower.

As for the memory frequencies, Albatron PX865PE Pro allows using DDR266 SDRAM with CPUs supporting 400MHz bus. If your CPU supports 533MHz bus, you can use Albatron PX865PE Pro with the memory working at 266MHz, 333MHz, and 354MHz. And with the new processors and fast 800MHz bus the memory frequency range supported by Albatron PX865PE Pro is the biggest of all:  266MHz, 320MHz, 400MHz, 533MHz and 532MHz. we will dwell on the memory bus frequencies of Albatron PX865PE Pro a bit more in the Overclocking section of this article.

The North Bridge of i865PE chipset features two more buses: AGP 8x and CSA (Communication Streaming Architecture). The first one is implemented on Albatron PX865PE Pro as an AGP 8x slot compatible with AGP 8x/4x graphics cards working at 1.5V. The second bus intended for Gigabit network controllers is not used by Albatron PX865PE Pro. Instead, the mainboard is equipped with a more traditional 3Com 910-A01 network controller.

This controller is connected via the regular PCI bus and allows building 10/100Mbit/sec network connections.

The rest of Albatron PX865PE Pro features is implemented via the chipset South Bridge. I865PE is shipped with ICH5 South Bridge, which we have already discussed in detail in our Intel 875 Chipset Review. The mainboard from Albatron we are talking about today has a version of this bridge without RAID support.

Due to this chip Albatron PX865PE Pro boasts 8 USB 2.0 ports, with two of them available on the mainboard rear panel and the remaining six can be used via the connectors on the mainboard PCB. Besides, the board supports SerialATA-150 drives and features 2 SerialATA-150 ports onboard. Of course, SerialATA integrated into the ICH5 South Bridge doesn’t require any special drivers. The HDDs connected to it start working right away. By the by, since the number of drives, which could be connected to the mainboard has grown up to 6 already, you should remember that all of them can work simultaneously only in Windows XP or Windows 2000. Older operation systems from Microsoft do not support more than four drives at a time.

As for the integrated sound, it is implemented via the Realtek AC’97 ALC650E chip. Although many manufacturers still prefer PCI sound controller, AC’97codec on our today’s mainboard ensures a pretty good sound quality, supports 5.1 sound systems and SPDIF Out.

Closer Look: Albatron PX865PE Pro PCB Design

The No.1 question during our tests of Albatron PX865PE Pro was to estimate the stability of this particular mainboard. i865PE chipset hasn’t been yet announced officially, so even though you can buy Albatron PX865PE Pro in a store, it is still very hard to get technical support for this mainboard. Albatron’s web-site doesn’t yet have any mention of it, as well as no new BIOS versions. Therefore, if you encounter any problems with Albatron PX865PE Pro, you will hardly be able to solve them before the official chipset launch. Luckily, Albatron’s R&D department did a really great job on the development and preliminary testing of this product. During our tests, we didn’t reveal any stability problems with this mainboard as well as with the entire system based on it.

And now let’s say a few words about the PCB design. When Intel prepared its i875 and i865 chipset families, they made sure that mainboards based on them could be easily mounted together. For example, despite the gigantic number of chipset pins and the necessity to lay out two DDR SDRAM channels, these chipsets do not require expensive and very complex 6-layer PCBs. This is exactly the reason why i865PE based mainboards will cost just a little more than i845 based ones. For example, Albatron PX865PE Pro mainboard costs just a little over $100.

This mainboard also owes its low cost to the absence of all extras except the network controller. As a result, it is of relatively small size and the components are located very freely.

At the same time, we wouldn’t call the design of Albatron PX865PE Pro ideal. Some components are not located the best way. The worst thing about the components layout is probably the FDD connector, which is placed on the very left of the PCB behind the last PCI slot. As a result, the FDD cable will run throughout the entire case hindering proper expansion cards installation and air circulation. Also, Albatron engineers for some reason place the USB4 connector right in front of the PCI slots.

Although Albatron PX865PE Pro feature only 5 PCI slots, the AGP slot was moved so close to the DIMMs, that the installed graphics card will inevitably block the DIMM slots clips.

The mainboard requires ATX 2.03 power supply units. Without the additional 12V cable Albatron PX865PE Pro will not even start. There is a three-channel impulse CPU voltage regulator. The chipset North Bridge is equipped with a big passive heatsink: this time Intel didn’t require any active cooling for its chipsets. The matter is that Intel selected 0.25micron production technology for its new core logic sets. Therefore, the heat dissipation of the new i865PE doesn’t go beyond 10W. That is why mainboard makers can easily do with a passive cooler.

BIOS and Overclocking

Albatron positions its PX865PE Pro mainboard as an overclocking-friendly solution. What made us think so, is first of all the words written on the mainboard box saying that Albatron PX865PE Pro supports up to 1000Mhz FSB frequency during overclocking. Well, I suggest checking out if the first i865PE based mainboard will be able to prove so successful during overclocking.

The BIOS of Albatron PX865PE Pro is based on Phoenix AwardBIOS v6.00PG. And it really does offer a broad range of opportunities to overclocking fans.

The page called BIOS Frequency/Voltage Control contains all the settings an overclocker might need. Moreover, there you can also find some info about the current frequencies of various buses, which is very helpful for further system configuring. As you can see, the mainboard offers the following options for overclocking:

• Adjustable FSB frequency from 100MHz to 255MHz with 1MHz increment;
• Adjustable AGP/PCI frequencies from 66MHz to 100MHz (the values are valid for the AGP bus);
• Adjustable Vcore, which can be set 0.1V, 0.2V or 0.3V higher than the nominal;
• Adjustable Vagp, which can be set 0.1V higher than the nominal;
• Adjustable Vdimm, which can be set 0.1V, 0.2V or 0.3V higher than the nominal.

At first glance, these are very nice features, however, there are a few things to be mentioned right away. Firstly, sophisticated overclockers may not be very happy with the available values for CPU Vcore and Vdimm. Secondly, 255MHz maximum for FSB frequency may also appear too low for the CPUs with the nominal 800MHz bus. If this FSB frequency is outstandingly high for CPUs with 400MHz or 533MHz bus, then those with 800MHz bus may need more. Here is an example. We managed to get hold of the new Pentium 4 2.4C processor intended to work with 800MHz bus. Of course, this processor is highly overclockable and we managed to speed it up to 3.2GHz on some other mainboards. To achieve this value we had to increase the FSB frequency to 270MHz. unfortunately, Albatron PX865PE Pro doesn’t allow this extreme overclocking. This is one of the reasons that we would call the overclocking features of Albatron PX865PE Pro pretty average.

As for the memory frequencies, everything will depend on the FSB frequency set for your CPU. It is not the best way to put this idea into life, however, Albatron engineers didn’t suggest any more convenient solution for some reason. As a result, the existing opportunities for adjusting memory frequency can be described as follows:

However, Albatron engineers can be really proud of the Turbo-mode for emory frequencies, which are not officially supported by i865PE, but which can still be used due to undocumented operations with the chipset registers.

The memory timings are listed in the other page of BIOS Setup called Advanced Chipset Features:

This page allows setting CAS Latency Time (available values: 2, 2.5, 3), Active to Precharge Delay (available values: 5, 6, 7, 8), DRAM RAS# to CAS# Delay and DRAM RAS# Precharge (available values: 2, 3 or 4). All in all, a pretty common set.

To test the overclocking friendly features of Albatron PX865PE Pro in real conditions, we tried to overclock Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz processor with 800MHz system bus. The tested CPU featured 1.55V Vcore and by raising its Vcore to 1.65V we managed to overclock it to 3525MHz on i875P based mainboards. In this case the FSB frequency was set to 235MHz. Albatron PX865PE Pro didn’t disappoint us here: we managed to achieve the same results without any problems.

By the way, during the tests we discovered that in case the CPU gets “over-overclocked” and the system simply can’t boot-up, FSB frequency doesn’t return to the nominal value automatically. However, the INS key works. If you press and hold this key on system boot-up, it will start with the “safe” CPU settings and will open BIOS Setup automatically for you to adjust the system parameters.

Testbed and Methods

Since Albatron PX865PE Pro is the first mainboard based on i865PE, which we managed to get hold of, the major goal of this test session will be to reveal the performance to be expected from the mainboards based on this chipset. To get a more illustrative analysis, we tested Albatron PX865PE Pro with the CPUs supporting 800MHz bus as well as with those working with 533MHz bus.

In our test session i865PE will compete with two other chipsets from Intel: i875P and i845PE. By comparing the performance of Albatron PX865PE Pro with that of an i875P based mainboard we will be able to conclude, how big the performance boost provided by PAT technology is. As for the comparison between i845PE and i865PE, it will give us to understand how efficient the introduction of dual-channel memory subsystems is for Pentium 4 platforms.

Besides that, within this test session we will also try to estimate how fast the i845PE based mainboards will run with the FSB overclocked to 200MHz. i845PE proved capable of working with 800MHz processor bus, if the mainboard PCB design is of sufficiently high quality. We undertook this experiment using a pretty old ASUS P4PE mainboard, however, it worked with 200MHz FSB absolutely impeccably. Moreover, ASUS Company does admit that its new BIOS versions for this mainboard are compliant with 800MHz bus. Besides, the new BIOS versions include a wider range of available FSB frequencies with the top value equal to 230MHz.

As a result, our test platforms were configured as follows:

We used all dual-channel chipsets in dual-channel mode. The BIOS’s of all mainboards were set to maximum performance. The tests were run in Windows XP SP1. the DDR333 memory timings were set to 2-2-2-5, the DDR400 timings were set to 2-2-2-6.

Performance: Memory Subsystem Benchmarks

We singled out the memory subsystems tests into a separate section on purpose. The thing is that work with the memory is a key parameter for each chipset, which tells a lot on its overall performance. First of all, we will take a look at the results obtained with the help of a highly useful Cachemem utility:

The results speak for themselves. However, there are still a few moments worth mentioning separately. First, if we compare the performance of i865PE and i875P memory subsystems in case of 800MHz system bus, we will see how efficient PAT technology actually is. The results show that this technology not only speeds up data transfer rates, but also reduces the memory latencies quite tangibly. It is exactly the reason why i875P based mainboards will be faster than solutions based on other chipsets.

Second, the numbers demonstrate that PAT technology works only for 800MHz bus. In fact, no one promised anything else. Even Intel does claim that this technology will work only for 800MHz FSB and dual-channel DDR400 SDRAM. Our experiment is clear evidence proving this fact. With 533MHz bus frequency both: i865PE and i875P turn out almost equally fast at transferring data and feature almost the same latencies.

Third, we should also say a few words about the performance of i845PE with the bus overclocked to 800MHz. of course, since i845PE is a single-channel chipset, its memory subsystem boasts lower bandwidth. However, due to single-channel architecture, this chipset boasts very low latency, outpacing here even i875P.

Now let’s have a look at the results obtained in some more common tests like PCMark2002 and SiSoft Sandra 2003.

Everything corresponds to the theory. In terms of memory speed, dual-channel chipsets outperform the single-channel i845PE, and the 800MHz bus is faster than 533MHz one. By the way, here you can see again that the use of i875P based mainboards is not justified at all here if you do not involve 800MHz bus. The results in this working mode are absolutely the same as those of i865PE based solutions.

Almost the same situation can be observed in PCMark2002. the only fact worth drawing attention to in this case is the performance of i845PE with the overclocked 800MHz bus, which appears faster than dual-channel chipsets working with 533MHz bus. It looks as if the results of this benchmark were very sensitive to the memory subsystem latency.

Performance: Business and Content Creation Applications

Well, we face a very unexpected situation right on the spot. The mainboard based on i845PE becomes the leader in this benchmark. In fact, there is nothing to be surprised with. The thing is that Intel Application Accelerator used in i845PE to speed up all disk operations due to additional buffering, doesn’t work with the new i865PE and i875P chipsets. Now Intel supplies a common IDE driver for the IDE controller integrated into the new ICH5 South Bridge, and Intel Application Accelerator is used only for RAID arrays. It is exactly the slower work with disk subsystem that prevented the new Intel chipsets from showing their best in this benchmark.

The disk speed is not so critical in Content Creation Winstone test, so everything returns to the natural course. The leadership belongs to i875P, and i865PE falls behind it because it lacks PAT technology. i845PE appears the last, because of the slower memory subsystem. However, when we set the bus frequency to 533MHz, i875P and i865PE level out and PAT technology of the first one doesn’t work.

Mp3 encoding speed first of all depends on the processor frequency. The memory speed doesn’t tell on the outcome of this benchmark that much.

The data compression results appeared very interesting. We compressed the folder with the 218MB Unreal Tournament 2003 demo program. With the 800MHz bus frequency i845PE suddenly defeated the dual-channel i865PE. However, as we have already said, i845PE boasts extremely low memory subsystem latency, which acts to its advantage here. In our turn, we would like to stress that the old buddy i845PE shouldn’t be dismissed so early.

In other applications dealing with data encoding and decoding, the results are quite predictable.

Performance: 3D Gaming Benchmarks

If the results of the new 3DMark2003 are exactly what we have expected them to be, then the results of the 3DMark2001 are similar to what we have just seen in WinRAR. The mainboard on i845PE chipset with 800MHz bus outperforms the dual-channel i865PE based platform.

As we see, low memory subsystem latency plays a crucial part in most 3D games: Unreal Tournament 2003 and Serious Sam 2 again show that i845PE with 800MHz bus is faster than i865PE.

Performance: 3D Rendering and Professional OpenGL Applications

During rendering the CPU speed is the most important factor. However, the memory subsystem latency also influences the results.

The results of SPECviewperf 7.1 are quite predictable. The performance in this benchmark depends a lot on the memory subsystem latency.

Conclusion

Well, the results appeared quite ambiguous. However, let’s try to draw some conclusions from them:

• With the CPUs supporting 533MHz bus there is no difference in performance of i875P and i865PE based systems. Performance Acceleration Technology doesn’t work in this case. As a result, it doesn’t make much sense to use a more expensive i875P in configurations like that.
• If there is a CPU supporting 800MHz bus, i875P chipset can ensure higher performance due to faster memory subsystem. However, this will hardly be an impressive advantage: about 1% in ordinary applications and about 2-3% in games. In the most successful cases i875P outperforms i865PE by about 6-7%. In fact, I don’t think this is a good argument in favor of a much more expensive i875P based mainboard.
• i845PE turns out too powerful to be dismissed yet. If you have a high-quality mainboard based on it, you will be able to use 800MHz bus. And the performance difference in this case will not be so big, as you might have expected it to be. Moreover, due to lower memory subsystem latency, i845PE with 800MHz bus manages to outperform the dual-channel i865PE in some applications (mostly in games). As for its performance with 533MHz bus, here it is always completely defeated by the new i865PE, unfortunately.

As a result, Intel created a very unpleasant situation for the users today. If you need a new system, you will definitely decide on a Pentium 4 processor with 800MHz bus and a mainboard based on either i865PE or i875P depending on your ability spend extra $50 for a slight performance growth. And as for upgrades, I wouldn’t give any recommendations here. Everything depends on the tasks your system is intended for. In some cases it might be better to just replace the CPU wit the one supporting 800MHz bus and to leave the i845PE based mainboard. And in some cases, you may need to also replace your board with the one supporting dual-channel memory configurations.

The table below illustrates the performance changes in different applications depending on the upgrade you do to your i845PE based system initially using the CPU with 533MHz bus: