AOpen i945Ga-PHS Dual Core Motherboard

Manufacturer: AOpen
Supplied by: AOpen
Street Price: $150.00

by Brian Tiller (12/13/2005)

Introduction

Over the past few months we've taken a look at at several Dual Core motherboards, some at the high end of the cost spectrum and some hovering down near the budget and cost conscious level. One thing that we've learned here at the 'Cafe is that while we don't see a great performance boost in today's games, when it comes to multi-media functions and multi-application use, these boards are where it's at. The ability to literally run multiple applications at the same time without a big performance hit is nice to have. Today we've got another of AOpen's Dual Core options to check out, the i945Ga-PHS. Our last offering from AOpen impressed us with it's performance so I'm pretty hopped up to see how this one does.

Specifications

With it's price tag of around $150, this board certainly isn't going to be classed at the high end of the cost arena, but it offers us a few noteworthy points that keep it from being a barebones budget board as well. Let's take a look at what AOpen has to say about this...

• CPU: Intel LGA775 (Prescott, Cedar Mill, and Smithfield cores)

• FSB: 533, 800 and 1066 (Yeah baby, gotta love that 1066)

• Chipset:

  • Northbridge: Intel 945G

  • Southbridge: Intel ICH7

• Memory: 4GB Max of DDR2 400/533/6

• Sound: 7.1 channel onboard sound, Azalia Codec

• Onboard 10/100/1000 Gigabit LAN

• Four onboard USB connections (max 8)

• Onboard IEEE 1394 FireWire

• Expansion Slots:

  • 1 PCI Express x16

  • 2 PCI Express x1

  • 3 PCI

• Drive Connections:

  • 1 IDE 100 connector

  • 6 SATA II 

  • 1 FDD

• RAID 0,1

• Onboard Graphics solution

• Onboard S-Video with HDTV support

• Power Master features

• Size: ATX (305mm x230mm)

As you can see, there are several features here which are a boost up from the 945Pa-PLF that we reviewed here a few months back. The onboard graphics and S-Video make this board a very tempting option for a HTPC box, plus they've added support for RAID 0 and 1.
 

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