Overclocker Cafe - AOpen AX4G Pro P4 Mainboard Review

AOpen AX4G Pro P4 Mainboard

Layout and Features

The AX4G Pro is the standard AOpen jumperless design with one AGP, six PCI, and one CNR slot. The overall placement is guided through the use of AOpen’s frequency isolation wall. This is the separation of regions of the board that operate at similar frequencies to prevent cross talk and interference that could have an effect on the board’s performance. The AGP slot includes what is becoming a standard AGP card clip that fastens the rear of the card in place to keep things snug. I’m not sure how useful this is because if you rattle, bang, or drop your case hard enough to knock a card out, you will have bigger problems that worrying about your AGP card.

Three DIMM slots that offer unofficial official support for DDR333 that can handle up to a gig stick each. Next to the DIMM slots is a huge shiny aluminum passive heatsink to cool the i845G chipset. The 845 chipset doesn’t produce an overt amount of heat so this passive cooling solution works out fine. Two USB jacks supportive of USB 2.0 are positioned next to the panel connectors. These are in addition to the standard two USB ports on the rear connector panel. Included with the AX4G Pro was a rear Multi I/O Bracket. This is necessary to accommodate some of the added features offered. Let’s look at some of these.

At a quick glace the rear connector panel looks to be nothing special. Upon closer inspection some notable differences stand out. The first of these is the AX4G Pro’s RJ45 10/100 NIC port. I for one, have become a fan of onboard NIC. We will be sure to look at how well it transfers data in our testing shortly. The other item of mention is that there is only one COM port. Where you would typically see COM port 2, a 15 pin VGA connector is placed. This is for the integrated 2D/3D onboard video. Traditionally, on board video has sucked from a performance standpoint. However, for a non-graphics related business application, an all in one mainboard is quite desirable.

The AX4G Pro also comes with onboard 5.1 Dolby sound via the Realtek AC97 CODEC. Sound and music lovers hate onboard sound about as much as gamers do onboard video. However, for the business application this represents a check in the plus column.

The EzWinFlash BIOS has got to be one of the coolest things since sliced bread. No more flashing and upgrade to your BIOS from a clean command prompt. With a couple of clicks you can easily download and upgrade you BIOS from within a windows environment.

All you Windows XP users out there can testify to the utility of the system restore function. AOpen’s EzRestore operates in the exact same way. Say you get everything running smooth as glass and you want insurance against things getting corrupted. You save a point, this one for instance. If the next day or week you install some new drivers and everything goes haywire, you run EzRestore to restore all your system settings to the way they were at the time you saved them. Basically, what you remember as a child when you screamed, “Do over!” This is a valuable resource not only for the individual but also for the office or a school. A computer course teacher can restore everything to a set point in spite of what his students do, break, or change. Pretty nifty.

New to the feature line up of AOpen, is the Open Jukebox Player. The Open Jukebox functions like many media players with one exception. This one does so outside of a windows environment. I'm not really sure when you would use something like this as that going into Windows to play a CD is no big deal.

The AX4G Pro supports AOpen's new Vivid BIOS technology which lets you use a "skin" on your BIOS screen. Like the CD Player, I'm not sure what the utility here is but it does add a few coolness points.

AOpen’s Watch Dog Timer is present to serve as a safety feature that reads the last system POST. If the system fails the POST, the Watch Dog Timer resets the system to redetect and enable the CPU’s default settings.

Doctor Voice II is another standard feature. If your system fails to post, the Dr. Voice program will "tell" you within a limited range of descriptors what the problem is in a very concrete manner, such as ‘problem with AGP.’

AOpen’s Die Hard BIOS is a feature utilizing two BIOS chips. If your system becomes corrupted or unusable from a bad setting in the BIOS or from a Virus attack to the BIOS coding itself; you can correct things by replacing a jumper. In doing this you bypass the original BIOS chip and defer to the backup BIOS chip allowing you to get up and running again.

Dr. LED is an eight light panel that has a LED correspond to each of the following: CPU, Memory, Video, PCI, Audio, HDD (hard drive disk), KB (keyboard), and Boot O.K. The appropriate LED lights up should the system fail at that point in boot up.

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