It's been an interesting 2004 so far in motherboard chipsets and CPUs. AMD has introduced the Athlon 64 3400+ CPU and the FX53 CPU to replace the FX51 in their lineup. Intel replaced their entire lineup of Northwood CPUs with a new lineup of .09um CPUs codenamed Prescott. Unfortunately, the really interesting changes to CPUs and motherboards will occur later in the year with the Socket 939 Athlon 64 series of CPUs from AMD and the upcoming CPUs based upon the Prescott core built with a new LGA-775 Socket Prescott's. For now, users wanting an Intel CPU basically have two choices in the marketplace as to high performance chipsets, the 875 and 865 chipsets from Intel.
Boards based upon the 875 (Canterwood) chipset were introduced in early 2003. It's hard to imagine that we're still using the 875 chipset, but it's similar in popularity to the i440BX chipset was with the previous Pentium 3 CPUs. The high-end CPUs along with it's brother chipset the 865 (Springdale) it just dominates the motherboard market for Intel CPUs.
Albatron as a company started in 1984 as Chun Corporation. As a company Chun made mostly televisions and other screens. In 2002, the company name was changed to Albatron. Albatron as a company makes motherboards, video cards, LCD monitors and other computer devices. To say they're a relative unknown in the enthusiast motherboard market is an understatement.
Albatron has made motherboards based on chipsets from many manufacturers including Intel, Via, ALI, Sis and NVIDIA. The 875P reviewed here was introduced a while back and is based upon Intel's 875P chipset. Albatron markets the 875P as a "Prescott ready" board. The previous version of this board also supports Prescott with a BIOS upgrade, but the board reviewed here is brand new. So let's see what this board is all about, shall we?
