AOpen AX4PE Max P4 Mainboard

BIOS

As you can see, the BIOS screen layout is pretty much standard and self explanatory. Once again I'd like to apologize for the picture quality, as I said before, I'm not a professional photographer, but I think you can see everything I'm talking about here. 

    

Since this board is angled more towards the enthusiast market, you can see that there are many more tweaking options available than in previous boards from AOpen. The FSB is adjustable all the way up to 248 in 1MHz increments, which is more than plenty for me. Voltage on the core gives you a range of 1.1 to 1.85 volts in .25 volt increments. However the DIMM voltage can only be adjusted up to 2.85 volts which in the mind of the overclocker is only so-so.

One of the biggest drawbacks to this board is the options for the memory. Billed as being DDR 333 capable, the board has only 2 options, DDR 266 and DDR 333. And I must point out that you can only take advantage of the DDR 333 option if you're running a CPU with a FSB of 533, otherwise it defaults to 266. Very poor form if you ask me.

Performance

Now we get to the meat of it. Testing the board we will be running several different bench programs. These will include Ziff Davis Content Creation 2002, Ziff Davis Business Winstone 2001, SiSoft Sandra Pro 2003, Mad Onion’s 3D Mark 2001 SE as well as Unreal Tournament 2003 with the Hard|OCP's bench for it. Since we should have a comparison, I'm using my own personal board, an Asus P4S533 based on the 645DX chipset. Should be interesting.

Test Bed

• Intel P4 2.4 GHz Northwood w/standard heatsink

• Corsair XMS3200 512 MB DDR 400

• Asus 52x CD Rom

• ABIT Siluro GeForce 4 Ti4200 (64 MB DDR)

• Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 20GB HDD

• Lian-Li PC-7323 Server Case

• Windows XP Professional

 

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