Overclocker Cafe - AOpen AX45 P4 mainboard (SiS645) review

AOpen AX45 P4 Mainboard

Manufacturer: AOpen
Supplied by: AOpen
Price: $79

By Dean Barker (3/30/2002)

Introduction

Today we are fortunate enough to have a brand spanking new AOpen AX45 on the bench in which we do indeed plan to spank. The AX45 while not as feature rich as some of AOpen’s other boards, it is priced competitively and has the features to make it stand out as an upper end bargain board. Features such as running off the SIS645 chipset which supports ATA100, onboard audio, either SDRAM or DDRAM up to the newer DDR333. In offering the basics of high performance without the extras, it seems clear that AOpen is targeting the AX45 for the upper end of the budget board market. Priced at $80, puts it well below the cost of other P4 boards. We wish to extend our thanks to the good folks at AOpen for sending the AX45 over for us to monkey with.

What you get

The brightly blue, orange, and yellow box has a clear panel on top so you get to see the board in all its black PCB goodness. In opening the box, you find the AX45 mainboard (of course), floppy and ATA66/100 ribbon cables, installation poster, AOpen’s driver disk, and a copy of Norton Anti-Virus 2002. The last is nice to see being that Norton 2001 is incompatible with Windows XP. What was absent was a printed manual. The ninety-eight page user manual for the AX45 is located on the driver disk in PDF format. This however could be problematic. If you don’t have a second machine around to read the disk should you run into trouble during installation, your difficulties could get compounded by frustration.

Specifications

Let’s look at the white paper and see what we have here.

Specs

CPU: Intel Pentium 4 Processor
ASIC: SiS 645 / 961 Chipset
Architecture: 6 PCI slots +1 AGP slot + 1 * CNR
Max. Main Memory: Max. 3GB DDR266 SDRAM or 2GB DDR333 SDRAM for 184pin DDR DIMM*3
DIMM Type:64/128/256/512MB/1GB
On Board LAN: Realtek RTL8100BL LAN controller onboard for 10/100Mbps Ethernet (optional)
On Board Sound: Realtek ALC201 AC’97 CODEC onboard
BIOS: Award Plug and Play 2Mb Flash ROM BIOS
On Board I/O: 2 Serial Ports (UART 16C550 Support)

Features

Support 4X AGP mode
Supports 6 USB ports
Support Ultra DMA/100 HDD
Wake On LAN
Zero Voltage Wake on Modem
Hardware Monitoring
PCI Rev 2.2 Compliant
Resettable Fuse Providing Short Circuit Protection for Keyboard and USB Device
ACPI S3 (Suspend to RAM) & S4 (Suspend to Disk) support
AOpen Bonus Pack CD (Norton Anti-Virus 2002 included)

Explanation of some of this.

The AOpen AX45 is centered on the SiS645 chipset. The SiS645 chipset itself offers support for either SDRAM or DDR SDRAM of the PC1600, PC2100, or PC2700 spec DIMMS. The addition of high bandwidth DDR is welcome indeed to the P4 crowd. The obvious performance choice would be the DDR333 (PC2700). Also supported are AGP 1x/2x/4x with fast writes. The matching SiS961 MuTIOL Media I/O provides for an integrated Fast Ethernet IEEE 802.3 and IEEE 802.3x MAC supporting duplex 10 Base-T, 100 Base-T Ethernet, or 1meg/sec and 10 meg/sec home networking. Also provided is the ability to handle up to six USB ports. Dual IDE channels with ATA100/66/33. The SiS961 further sports an integrated audio controller supporting AC 97 v2.2 audio codec and Modem codec as well as 5.1 Dolby sound. This is what the chipset supports and not necessarily what AOpen provides for with the AX45. The only glaring missing item is the Dolby 5.1. Why AOpen choose not to add 5.1 Dolby the world may never know. The AX45 further offers the onboard LAN as an optional feature.

Another optional feature of the AX45 is the Dr. LED. This is an eight light panel that has a LED corresponding to each of the following: CPU, Memory, Video, PCI, Audio, HDD (hard drive disk), KB (keyboard), and Boot O.K. If there is a problem, a quick glance at the panel can tell you at which point the system failed in boot up.