AOpen AX4G Pro P4 Mainboard

 

BIOS

Moving to the BIOS, we find many of the standard tweakables.  Memory settings are available but limited.  No voltage adjustments for the memory were present.  Neither was an option to select the memory command rate.  Everything else you would expect, is here with the exception of these two.  What stood out was the DRAM clock speed selector.  The board is billed as supporting DDR333.  With this in mind, why are the only DRAM clock speed presets DDR266, DDR200, and auto.  Maybe this is just me but I would have liked to see a DDR333 preset.

Within the frequency / voltage control area you have the option of adjusting the front side bus in 1MHz increments from 100 up to 248MHz.  Voltage on the core gives you a range of 1.1 to 1.85 volts in .25 volt increments.

Below is what the layout of the main BIOS menu looks like as well as what has come to be the standard PC Health Status screen.  You can also see in the pic to the bottom right a load and save EEPROM option.  Once you adjust your BIOS to the way you like it you can 'save' these setting in the EEPROM.  So if you clear the CMOS or experiment with another setting that doesn't work out, by selecting the 'load' EEPROM option you bring back your BIOS settings you saved previouslly.

  

Performance

To test our board we will be using the Ziff Davis Content Creation 2002, Ziff Davis Business Winstone 2001, SiSoft Sandra Pro 2002, Mad Onion’s 3D Mark 2001 SE and 3D Mark 2000 v1.1, and the benching standard Quake 3 Arena.  We will be using an AOpen AX45 based on the SiS645 chipset and an AOpen AX4B Max based on the Intel 845D chipset as our comparison boards.  It will be interesting to see the differences between the i845D and i845G based boards.

Test Bed

• Intel P4 1.8GHz Northwood

• Thermaltake Volcano 7+ HSF

• Corsair XMS3000 512mb stick of PC3000 DDR

• Maxtor D740X-6L 40gb ATA-133 7200RPM HDD

• ASUS 52x CD-ROM

• ASUS V8200 GeForce 3

• Lian Li PC-6089A Case

• Windows XP Professional

NIC

Since this is the first board we have reviewed with an onboard NIC; we thought it wise to bench it out.  Everything looks to be going very well according to Sandra.

 

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