The Board
The board is simply just BEAUTIFUL! It is constructed with a nice shiny blue PCB and uses a white P4 bracket frame and colored IDEs and DIMM slots. This board is just full of colors.
Placement of certain things could have been better but there were no problems with hardware getting in the way. Location of the floppy connector below the 5th PCI slot is certainly not the best place but with serial ATA RAID and the Promise controller and IDEs, it looks like there's not much more choice. Right above the floppy connector is the firewire ports, controlled by VIA's chip.
The ATX connector located high up top right next to the DIMM slots was certainly a plus. It makes the power cable easy to hide in the open drive bays. The regular IDEs might get in the way of certain cases but has been good with me so far.
The Promise RAID IDEs can be placed no better than this. It creates very little cable clutter since hard drives are located at the bottom of the case anyway.
Although this board lacks fan headers (only 3 available and 2 to use due to northbridge fan), they have been placed quite well.
One main thing that people have been having problems with P4 boards is the first DIMM slot and the end of the AGP slot. Many times people will find trouble with longer video cards such as the infamous Voodoo5 5500 and the new Nvidia 5900 series.
Intel's ICH5R southbridge hosts two serial ATA capable of RAID 0 and usb2.0. There are three connectors available. 2 of them are used with the PCI bracket while the other one is extra for cases with USB ports in the front.
Here is a shot of the I/O connectors. The missing port is supposed to house Springdale's onboard video. Since there is no onboard video on our board today, it has been blocked off with a plastic guard.
Albatron has some onboard features that make them special compared to others. Their Bios Mirror makes flashing bios almost fail proof, since with a bad update you can go into the second bios and then re-flash the man bios. Their second feature is the Voice Genie. It's a diagnostic program that tells the user what problem has been encountered when something goes wrong. Pretty cool feature comparing to the old plain LED diagnostic found on some boards. The dipswitches control AGP protection, Bios Mirror, and the Voice Genie language selection. The AGP protection makes sure that the video card installed is either agp4x or agp8x. No older card could be used.
Albatron has decided to use Intel's Gigabit LAN for its onboard ethernet connection. For the average Joe like us who have cable or DSL connection, Gigabit LAN is pretty much a waste. It is more useful for businesses that have T1 connection or college students who dorm. I wish I had Gigabit LAN during my freshmen year. The extra speed connection could have helped me download more pr0n...wait that came out wrong. It could have helped me send emails even faster!
