Albatron PX865PE Pro II (865PE): It's Springdale Time

Albatron PX865PE Pro II: Stress Testing

We managed to stress test the PX865PE Pro II in several different areas and configurations, including:

1. Chipset and motherboard stress testing was conducted by running the FSB at 278MHz
2. Memory stress testing was conducted by running RAM at 333MHz and 400MHz in dual DDR operation at the most aggressive timings possible.

Front Side Bus Stress Test Results:

As usual we ran a large load of stress tests and benchmarks to ensure the PX865PE Pro II was absolutely stable at each overclocked FSB speed we experimented with. We ran our usual array of stress tests, including Prime95 torture tests, which were run in the background for a total of 48 hours.

We also proceeded to run lots of other tasks such as data compression, various DX8 games, and light apps like Word and Excel while Prime95 was running in the background. Finally, we reran our entire benchmark suite, which includes Sysmark 2002, Quake3 Arena, Unreal Tournament 2003, SPECviewperf 7.0, and XMPEG. In the end, 278MHz FSB was the highest overclock we were able to achieve with our conservative overclocking setup without encountering any reliability problems.

Memory Stress Test Results:

The following memory stress test gauges how well the PX865PE Pro II is able to handle dual DDR333 mode with all memory banks filled. This has proven to be a simple task for the vast majority of Dual Channel DDR Pentium 4 motherboards based on SiS and Intel chipsets, so let's see if the PX865PE Pro II is any different:

As usual we see that a dual DDR400 desktop motherboard is easily capable of the most aggressive memory timings in dual DDR333 mode. This has been proven time and again in our past motherboard reviews, a complete index of which you can find over here. The Stress Testing sections of those reviews will contain memory timing results that you should be able to attain assuming you've put together a similar hardware configuration as listed in the Performance Test Configuration sections of those reviews.

The following memory stress test is obviously a bit more strenuous on the memory subsystem than most memory stress tests, as it tests the rare occasion that a desktop user will install four DIMMs running in dual DDR400 mode at the most aggressive memory timings available in the BIOS:

While these timings aren't as good as some of the 875P motherboards we've tested in the past, they're still fairly adequate. We should note that we were able to stress test the PX865PE Pro II at CAS 2/2T/6T/2T for quite some time before we were finally able uncover reliability issues. As listed above, CAS 2/3T/6T/2T timings were very reliable.

We tested all these memory timings with several stress tests and general apps to make sure they were stable. We started off by running Prime95 torture tests; a grand total of 24 hours of Prime95 was successfully run at the timings listed in the above charts. We also ran Sciencemark (memory tests only) and Super Pi. All three stress tests failed to make the PX865PE Pro II fail at the timings listed in the charts.