From a graphics/gamers point of view most exciting for us is of course that PCI-Expess technology is slowly replacing the older PCI and AGP ports, why? Bandwidth... it's all about bandwidth these days and the PCI-Express solution is a major step into the future. Did you know that one PCI-Express lane (x1) has more bandwidth then your mainboard's entire PCI bus? PCI used to share that bus with all PCI devices, so a fast ethernet controller was capable of utilizing and stressing the entire PCI bus... that's a thing of the past as well as x1 PCI Express offers 500MB/sec full duplex over its own pipeline. No more sharing that bandwidth and thus better performance for all devices. Yes I'm all for the PCI Express bus.

Today's mainboard is one from the fine folks at Albatron, we will have a peek at their latest PX915P/G Pro mainboard from their "Mars" series. Armed with Intel's 915G North Bridge (MCH) and ICH6 South Bridge chipset plus the luxury of an integrated graphics card solution this mainboard offer heaps of goodies for really not a lot of money. It just doesn't end with the usual plethora of features though, naah it's Albatron remember? The mainboard offers a nice mixture of options. Let me name some the other key features of the finest of mammaboards: Dual Onboard LAN (1x 1Gbit & 1x 100 Mbit), 8-channel onboard audio, RAID controler, Serial ATA, dual channel DDR400 memory, PCI Express x16 (1) PCI Express x1 (1x) and 3 PCI slots, 8x USB 2.0 and so on. Basically when you buy a new system, plug a CPU and some memory in it and you are set to go.

Let's fire up this review shall we...

There she is, Albatron's Mars PX915P/G Pro - Danger Will Robinson Danger !