Overclocker Cafe - AOpen AX45 P4 mainboard (SiS645) review

AOpen AX45 P4 Mainboard

Layout

AOpen has stuck with the black PCB that does nothing for performance but looks ultra cool. Mounted on this coolness are 6 PCI slots, 1 AGP slot, 1 CNR Expansion slot, 2 ATA 33/66/100 IDE connectors, 3 184-pin DIMMS supporting DDR RAM, as well as three fan headers. AOpen groups connectors so all your cables are grouped in one location of the board which gives things a neat and clean appearance that remains easily accessible once installed.

The AX45 utilizes a passive cooling solution for the SIS645 chipset. The bright shiny aluminum sink is aesthetically pleasing in spite of it being only passive cooling for the chipset. Underneath the sink we found a dreaded piece of TIM as opposed to thermal paste. The passive chipset cooling for this board seems to keep inline with the AOpen wanting to be budget conscious with the AX45.

One item with the board’s layout was the proximity of the DIMM slots to the AGP slot. After we installed our ASUS GeForce3 we noticed that the lower DIMM retention clip on the first DIMM slot cannot be opened with a VGA card installed. What this boils down to is that if you want to replace memory once your system is up, you will need to take out your video card. While not a major detriment to the board’s layout it is at a minimum, an inconvenience.

BIOS

The BIOS of the AOpen AX45 is straight forward. Minimal latitude is available for tweaking here.

Right here is the meat of any BIOS, the CPU clock control.

Pretty scanty stuff. No accessibility to voltage adjustments and a limited number of FSB settings stand out right off the bat. The settings offered are in the format of CPU frequency / RAM frequency / PCI Clock. These are …

100/100/33
100/133/33
100/166/33
105/140/35
108/144/36
112/149/37
100.9/100.9/33.63
100.9/134.53/33.63
133/100/33
133/133/33
133/166/33

Moving to the chipset features screen you have the ability to adjust the CAS Latency and the DRAM command rate. There is an adjustment for “System Performance” with selected options of 'Normal', 'Fast', 'Turbo', 'Ultra', and 'Safe' available. These are pretty much one click performance bumps to your memory settings. I'd say the selections don't need any explanation in how aggressive they are. Never a single hiccup did we see regardless of what setting we used.

PC Heath Status shows you live readings of all your voltages and temperatures. You have the option to select a shutdown temperature should things begin to dangerously overheat when you may not be around to save the day. An example being, say a heatsink fan fails, which has happened to me before while in the midst of online bloodshed. I was so engrossed in what I was doing I almost didn’t notice my CPU temp dangerously high. This is a very nice insurance policy.

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