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Conclusion
This is a real Albatron product, for a respectable price you'll receive a Grantsdale mainboard that offers heaps of functionality, features and most of all really excellent performance. It performs as expected and it runs just fine, why? It's an Albatron mainboard. There really isn't anything to dislike about this product.
About anything that I can think of about this mainboard looks and feels right. It has all whistles and bells that you want from 8x USB 2.0 to heaps of HD/Optical connectivity. You get your Dual LAN configuration (excellent if you want to use your PC as router) with integrated Gigabit (1000/100/10) LAN, which will keep you compatible for years to come. LAN we had to test on 100Mbit as we do not have 1000Mbit in our office (yet). 100Mbit/sec ran peachy though and with two fast HD's about 80% of the bandwidth was utilized which makes it a very fast network integrated solution. Integrated 8-channel sound which by the way isn't exactly Audigy 2 quality but great quality, Dolby Digital, what do we need to say more? Quite honestly it's pretty darn good! Next to that the BIOS is flexible and set up in a way that will allow you to overclock pretty easily.
So the big advantage here is you got everything integrated, yet with the flexibility to upgrade. I mean, to get you started basically you need some memory, a HD, a processor+cooler and a PSU. All the rest is integrated, it's almost the swiss knife among mainboards. Don't expect much from the integrated graphics solution though, at least not if you are a gamer. Two things I did miss on this mainboard though, VoiceGenie and Dual BIOS. Both can help you out a lot if your mainboard runs into troubles.
Next to all the features this board performs as expected. It did not have any issues with our new 3.6 GHz Prescott (ay scotty!) at all. In fact we where able to overclock the poor thing towards 4 GHz with a traditional cooler. Granted, the CPU will be so hot you'll be able to fry an egg on it, but all I'm saying is it's possible to crank the performance up a notch. With proper cooling I thing I'd be able to sustain a 235-240 MHz quad pumped FSB. If you are opting for this mainboard then please buy two identical memory modules, preferably specific Dual Channel DDR memory. Your memory bandwidth will increase dramatically and so will your overall performance.
It's all about the combination or rather symbiosis of proper products. The mainboard with 800 MHZ FSB socket 775 processor and Dual Channel DDR, PCI Express are the key items here. PCI-Express functions as promised. True you will not gain graphical performance, this is due to the current state of graphics cards, yet it won't perform lower either. In the future (a year from now) you'll be happy that you upgraded to a PCI-Express mainboard as the architectural design benefits greatly from it over traditional bus design, and I'm not talking just about the graphics card.
Properly equipped this system will be among the fastest performing platforms you have ever owned. The bold figure in dollars is simply worth every penny. How much do you ask? How does 120 bucks sound? And hey, if you think that's too much to match your budget then you can also opt the 'normal' non G version (no integrated graphics), which is available for about 112 bucks, but for 8 bucks I'll opt the graphics anytime. Oh hey, and also quite important, you'll receive a 3 year warrantee on this mainboard, which of course is very nice.
Two thumbs up as for that kind of money the performance versus features that this mainboard offers is making it a downright steal, there's no reason not to buy this mainboard. You will not make a bad choice by buying it. Nice work Albatron on your first ever LGA775 mainboard !
Product: Intel 915G Mainboard
Series: Mars PX915P/G ProManufacturer: Albatron
MSRP: 120 USD
