Board Design
Albatron has implemented a good board design with some minor quirks. Like all Intel motherboards, this board comes with the standard retention mechanism and ample room to fit larger aftermarket heatsinks such as the Thermal Right AX478 and the Alpha PAL8942T. Also, we can see that Albatron opted for the standard three phase power regulation scheme, which is sufficient for the power regulation of today, as well as passively cooling the northbridge. The auxiliary 12V connector is also located above the socket. Those of you into case modding, Albatron has continued to use a teal PCB for their motherboards.
South of the socket area, are the memory slots as well as the standard IDE and floppy connectors. The main ATX power plug is located in the ideal spot for most users, right at the corner of the board. To the far left, you can find two connectors for Serial ATA in addition to the extra channel for the standard ATA, the two BIOS chips and another fan header. The memory slots are quite close to the AGP slot, so changing sticks of memory would mean that the graphics cards will have to be removed.
There is a minor problem with the power indicator light on all Albatron P4 boards I have seen. The bank accepts only a two pin connector while the connectors on my Lian Li and Senfu Tech House use a three pin connector. It would mean that you would have to modify the connector or live without the indicator light. The modification is quite simple and can be done quickly by rewiring a LED to a spare two pin connector.
The board features one AGP slot and six 32bit PCI slots. The AGP slot is outfitted with a sliding retention mechanism that engages and disengages with ease rather than the difficult to use tabbed version found on most motherboards. The pin headers for the USB 2.0 breakout are poorly placed, right along the edge of the AGP slot. This makes it difficult to reach if you have a graphics card with an overly large heatsink such as my Leadtek Ti4400. Finally, above the expansion slots lie the connectors for the SPDIF breakout, which I did not receive, and other audio related connections.
The backplane is the standard one seen on most boards. The second serial port is missing, blocked out by a blue plastic panel. Most likely, this is to allow flexibility in the manufacturing process so that 845PE/GE boards can use the same components. GE boards feature integrated video where the missing serial port is. Unfortunately, Albatron does not include a breakout panel for that missing serial port for those still using legacy technologies.
