*** Official Albatron PX865PE Pro/II (865PE) Thread ***

[eva2000]

Originally posted by: cwalker2000
I e-mailed Albatron Tech Support about the PEM and here is the response:

Albatron has implemented the PEM function which is similar to Intel's PAT on the 875 chipset. You can download the latest bios version for your PX865PE PRO or PRO II and go to the bios setup to enable it. Please see attached pix for reference. Thank you very much.


They claim 5-10% gain. There are 2 modes: PEM1, and PEM2. They sent me a .jpg of the BIOS setting, but I do not know how to post it here.

Let me know if I can post a .jpg here so everyone can see!!

i'm using PRO2 and 1.02 beta bios with PEM support and it gives an extra 300MB/s sandra bandwidth with PEM1 if i assume PEM1 is without extreme timings enabled and PEM2 is with extreme timings enabled which gives a further 300-400MB/s sandra bandwidth

unfortunately not memory i've used to date can handle extreme timings mode on PRO2

 

[2hotP3s]

I really like this mobo, its a damn shame that 1.6V is the max Vcore.
I have written to Dr Pro about it, but no response yet.

 

[kponds]

check out the newest bios. Unless I downloaded the wrong thing here (and I am in a hurry to go to work) you get:

1. Vcore setting of +.1, .2, .3
2. FSB of 200 to 550 settings with 800Mhz CPU!!!

Going to work - can anyone confirm?

 

[eva2000]

Originally posted by: kponds
check out the newest bios. Unless I downloaded the wrong thing here (and I am in a hurry to go to work) you get:

1. Vcore setting of +.1, .2, .3
2. FSB of 200 to 550 settings with 800Mhz CPU!!!

Going to work - can anyone confirm?

i think you're talking about PRO board and not PRO2, PRO2 only has max 1.6v vcore

Dr Pro replied to my voltage queries about PRO2 and said they have engineers looking at it but no guarantees. Then later i read another PRO2 review and they confirmed Albatron isn't going to release any bios updates to up any of the voltages...

 

[2hotP3s]

im gonna try to compare BIOSes for the pro and pro II to see whats in common...
-2hot

 

[2hotP3s]

eva2000,
Who did you speak to at Albatron to give you that answer? I emailed "Dr. Pro" and all I get is a Intel PDF talking about voltage specs for the CPU.

 

[mcveigh]

anyone get this thing to use hard drives larger than 160 GB?
I put a 180 GB drive in and it shows up as 130gb

 

[tydas]

I had that problem with the serial ata. i have a 200gb hooked up to primary ide and it works fine

 

[mcveigh]

Originally posted by: tydas
I had that problem with the serial ata. i have a 200gb hooked up to primary ide and it works fine

I have a 180 GB IDE drive hooked up and it won't work. mine is hitachi/ibm what's yours?

 

[Flanders2833]

Just wanted to drop in...I just got my Pro-II from NewEgg and a 2.4C, and 2x256 of the Corsair PC3700. I also bought a Zalman CNPS7000 and it fits without any problem. First flashed to 1.02b and installed XP Pro with no problems, I'm not using the SATA or Promise at the moment - maybe later. I downloaded the latest drivers from the Albatron website before I got started. As someone already noted, the VIA Envy driver which appears via Windows Update is newer than the latest driver file from Albatron. In any event, it sounds very good - the only time there may be a stray pop is at bootup when XP is initializing devices - no biggie.

At default vcore, there were not any issues to get up to 1000FSB @ 3.0Ghz / 400DDR. That's where the fun ended somewhat. I attempted to enable the "Memory Performance" enhancement, but each time I enabled and saved the setting in BIOS, the setting does not hold, even though I do have a 800FSB CPU. Setting the OC Dram Stability to Optimized actually reduced my Sandra Scores. Ironically though, I set the CPU/DDR ratio to 2x which gave DDR500. The Corsair at stock voltage and 8-4-4-3 seems to be cooperating it also passed the quick memtest routine. Sandra scores are around 5100 / 5050. I wish I could figure out what's going on with the PAT like setting(s) but for now I'm just going to relax and enjoy 3Ghz for the price of 2.4.

I recently went through 3 NForce2 boards with an Athlon XP. After suffering from middling IDE disk performance and a somewhat intense fussiness towards DDR ram stick pairs, I threw in the towel I guess and decided to give Intel a spin. So far, the Pro II and my P4 have given a combination of performance that required higher levels of frustration and blood pressure to reach when using my AMD setups.

 

[DBrock]

Try setting the processor FSB to 800 MHz: that was the only way I could get the "Memory Enhancement" setting to stick.

Personally, I'd rather have the 1100+ MHz FSB speed. This is a great little motherboard.

 

[Flanders2833]

Thanks...that was kind of floating around in the back of my head. Are the other 865's similar in the sense that if they're OC'd FSBwise that there is no additional 'boost'? I too agree it's a great lil' board, I'm going to try and bump it a little above 1000FSB once I can confirm it's really stable with all my apps (which it already seems to be)

 

[DBrock]

I've found that running Memtest-86 (http://www.memtest86.com) is a pretty fast way of
evaluating whether you've gone too far on the memory overclocking. My best test for CPU
OC'ing stability so far is MPEG encoding (crashes real fast if I've gone too far!).

Until I bought this motherboard, my mind was still stuck thinking SDRAM thoughts: I thought
that the faster the memory was running, the better the overall performance would be.

That doesn't appear to be an absolute. I started out with two 256MB Spectek (Micron) DDR333
sticks (the Albatron dealer didn't have any more DDR400 memory).

I found that the best performance with my 2.4C was to use the CPU/DDR ratio setting
of X1.33 (also called 3:2) and never let the memory get even near it's rated clock speed.
My best Sandra memory test score was 4867 & 4854 for the DDR333 memory. Of course, this
memory hardly stands up to comparison with the memory your system has (but hey... I'm cheap!)

A similar experience was written up in an article on www.overclockers.com by Ed Stroligo on 6/6/03
on his experience with his Abit IC-7 , with a 2.4C and two sticks of Corsair XMS3500. He also concluded that max'ing out the FSB while undeclocking the memory gave him better overall performance. I guess I'm not a real overclocker: I can't justify buying DDR466 or DDR500 memory
pairs for 200 or 300 MHz of possible speed increase.

I am running my CPU and memory at stock voltage: I proved very fast with Memtest that
overvolting the Spectek memory wasn't helping me at all. Ditto with overvolting the CPU as well.
Right now my CPU is running 38 deg C. with a stock Intel heatsink. It gets up to about 43 deg
after running all day.

I'm looking REALLY HARD for something to complain about with this motherboard, but I'm still
happy with the hardware. I'm even beginning to not complain about XP Pro as much: hyperthreading
processor support is worth it!
happy at getting 3.3 GHz out of a 2.4 GHz-rated (and priced) CPU.
much happier with it than my previous MB, an Abit BX6 Rev2.

 

[jazziz]

Is the PRO II worth the extra $85 (compared to the PRO)? I don't care much for the VIA Envy sound, I'm happy with my SB Live. Any comments/opinions would be very much appreciated.

 

[TomHrv]

If you don't need extra features provided by Pro-II, go for plain Pro version. Check out Albatron web site first, it's not only Envy sound. Pro-II also supports RAID due to ICH5R (vs. Pro's ICH5), additional Promise controller, firewire ports, dual-BIOS etc.
Personally, I'm very happy with my PX865-Pro, since I only have one S-ATA HDD and plan to buy Audigy2 soon... (2.4C @ 3.0 perfectly stable with default voltage and standard cooler).

Regards,
Tom

 

[Flanders2833]

You're preaching to the choir about memtest...lol It was the first thing I downloaded after buying my first Epox 8RDA.

I took out the 2 / 256 PC3700 Corsair and put in 2 / 512 sticks of PC3200 Twinmos, a good tip by you Brock, since I'm basically only slightly behind in terms of performance in comparison to the Corsair I bought.

The wall I keep hitting with both the Twinmos and even the Corsair is that I can't run 3:2 or 5:4 at relaxed timings once I get past about 255 host frequency. Has anyone read the posts in the IS7 official thread and others where people are (kinda) stating that there may be an issue with the Winbond chips used (at least on the Twinmos). There seems to be many that are hitting the "250 wall" so to speak. There's also more than a few rants about problems with the Corsair as well trying to run at high speeds with either 3:2 / 5:4. And as Brock put in a previous post, he's right on the money about upping the cpu and/or ddr voltage, it only seemed to make things worse.

At 1:1 I was able to run the Corsair at 250 (DDR500) errorfree, but for right now, that slight bump in my memory scores isn't worth the $179

I wish I had the idle and load temps that I've seen here and in a few other threads. I guess I'm lumped in with the 'other' group of P4 owners. I started out with the stock heatsink just to give it a whirl, load temps running Seti / Prime got up 66c, idle was around 45c. With the Zalman it's been much improved, idle is around 42c, load 53c. Hopefully once the ASIII sets up fully it may drop another degree or two. My case temps were around 30c

Lastly, on the Envy sound issue - is there supposed to be an XP audio control panel modification during the install of the driver - or is there a mfg control panel app available? On (2) of my NF2 boards, there was a nice looking audio control panel that NVidia provided to tweak the effects, etc on the MCP-T. For this board with the Envy, all I saw was the ".INF" file and ".SYS" file on my install CD which just provides basic driver support.

 

[tydas]

Lastly, on the Envy sound issue - is there supposed to be an XP audio control panel modification during the install of the driver - or is there a mfg control panel app available? On (2) of my NF2 boards, there was a nice looking audio control panel that NVidia provided to tweak the effects, etc on the MCP-T. For this board with the Envy, all I saw was the ".INF" file and ".SYS" file on my install CD which just provides basic driver support.

I asked the same question. all I see is basic driver support and nothing else. Very disappointing for a supposed 'high end' audio solution. In addtion, sound in BF1942 was all messed up using the via envy controller. I'm back to my phillips AE until they update these drivers a bit...

 

[Flanders2833]

Sorry Tydas that I didn't see you previous post. Apparently there is no separate control panel app or enhancement right now.

 

[Grimp]

I read somewhere that the AGP/PCI bus isn't locked? Text Anyone else have any kind of problems with AGP/PCI? I have a 865PE Pro II and I remember having problems with a 9700 and a PCI IDE card even though AGP/PCI were locked at 66/33.

 

[tydas]

Originally posted by: Grimp
I read somewhere that the AGP/PCI bus isn't locked? Text Anyone else have any kind of problems with AGP/PCI? I have a 865PE Pro II and I remember having problems with a 9700 and a PCI IDE card even though AGP/PCI were locked at 66/33.

Its not locked by default but you can lock it as well as the PCI bus.

 

[Flanders2833]

Well as an update, the Northbridge fan on my PX865PE Pro II has started to intermittently buzz. I also started to get the intermittent popping and/or hissing in my games that Tydas has mentioned. So I hate to say it, but I pulled the plug and ordered a P4P800dlx. I posted over in the P4P800 thread about how it went, but needless to say, it's been pretty kick as*! I've got Sandra memory scores of nearly 6GB/sec with 1gig of ram onboard @ 275fsb with my 2.4C.

I may have just got a bum board or whatever, but who knows with these things.

Wish everyone here well with their Alby's....
F-

 

[MrThc]

Originally posted by: tydas
OK, got the board but i have a couple of issues/ questions:

1. Can't install windows when my HD is on the raid controller IDE. Everything is enabled and i hit F6 during windows XP install to load promise drivers but it still does not see the HD. I am just going to put the HD on primary IDE and load promise drivers from windows and then switch the ide cable of HD to promise controller. Hopefully that will work.

I had the exact same problem, and I couldnt get HDD's to work on the Promise controller as standard hdd's even after installing drivers in Windows. After a few emails back and forth with Dr Pro, I have now been sent a 65PE103b Bios, which works perfectly for me with the HDD's now. hopefully it will be officially released soon.

 

[Grimp]

Originally posted by: MrThc

Originally posted by: tydas
OK, got the board but i have a couple of issues/ questions:

1. Can't install windows when my HD is on the raid controller IDE. Everything is enabled and i hit F6 during windows XP install to load promise drivers but it still does not see the HD. I am just going to put the HD on primary IDE and load promise drivers from windows and then switch the ide cable of HD to promise controller. Hopefully that will work.

I had the exact same problem, and I couldnt get HDD's to work on the Promise controller as standard hdd's even after installing drivers in Windows. After a few emails back and forth with Dr Pro, I have now been sent a 65PE103b Bios, which works perfectly for me with the HDD's now. hopefully it will be officially released soon.

Funky, I didn't have that problem, but I did have a problem with the Intel NIC booting instead of the Promise controller. Anyway, the new BIOS allows you to turn off the boot rom. 865PE Pro II 1.03b BIOS

 

[jazziz]

Hi all,

I just setup PX865PE Pro with 2.4C. At boot up the cpu temp is showing 60 at bios and 50 with MBM. This temp seems pretty high for a P4. And the difference of 10 deg. between BIOS and MBM is pretty big. Is this normal, or is something wrong with my mobo? Any input is greatly appreciated.

 

[Grimp]

Originally posted by: jazziz
Hi all,

I just setup PX865PE Pro with 2.4C. At boot up the cpu temp is showing 60 at bios and 50 with MBM. This temp seems pretty high for a P4. And the difference of 10 deg. between BIOS and MBM is pretty big. Is this normal, or is something wrong with my mobo? Any input is greatly appreciated.

I think it's because the CPU is at 100% processing in the BIOS but has an idle thread in 2000/XP to stop it from processing.