Intel announces DDR333 Chipsets: 3-way 845PE shootout

Albatron PX845PEV Pro: Basic Features

Albatron's 845PE board offers a pretty intriguing feature set, although there aren't that many bells and whistles.

We'll start off first by taking a look at the onboard sound and LAN. As we've seen on so many other Pentium 4 and Athlon XP motherboards, Albatron slaps on a Realtek ALC650 chip. This chip is capable of 6-channel sound, and contains a lot of the same features as C-media's CMI8738 sound chip, also found on many Pentium 4 and Athlon XP motherboards.

Thankfully Albatron threw in a LAN chip to the mix. LAN is always a great onboard feature to have, as it serves to simplify the installation and maintenance process (of course all onboard features do this). LAN is powered by 3Com's 910-A01 chip, which is an unconventional onboard LAN solution these days. Usually you see onboard LAN chips in the form of Realtek's 8100 series chips.

Moving on, we see a not so unusual I/O configuration. Albatron bundles two PS/2 port, two serial ports, one parallel port, and a Game Port.

Besides what we've already mentioned, there's not much else to see. This is a fairly straight forward motherboard, with basically no real features that stand out. Of course, you'll see in the coming pages why this is hardly the most interesting aspect of the Albatron PX845PEV Pro…