Overclocker Cafe - AOpen i945Pa-PLF Black Limited

AOpen i945Pa-PLF Black Limited

What you get:

Taking a look at the bundle that comes with the board, we can see that AOpen is trying to keep the cost of the board down but still adding one or two personal touches. Along with the motherboard manual, they have included one of those big fold out quick start guides which are great, especially for a new system builder.

The 'Bonus CD' contains the drivers as well as AOpen's Power Master, AOpen Config and EZ Skin utilities. The other CD is a copy of Norton's Anti-Virus 2005. As for the cables, we've got one SATA cable and one SATA power cable, one rounded IDE cable and one rounded FDD cable.

Board Layout

My first impression of the board was pretty favorable. With the black PCB as a backdrop, AOpen threw in some extra colors to give it some splash.

The roominess of the board is very apparent. Especially around the socket. As you can see, these are nice low profile capacitors which shouldn't interfere with after market cooling solutions. Gives the whole area a nice roomy feel to it.

Both the Northbridge and the Southbridge are covered with passive heatsinks. The sink on the Northbridge is a pretty typical aluminum jobber with large cooling fins.

The Southbridge sink is a different story. Most manufacturers don't bother with a sink here, but not only has AOpen thrown one on, but they've done so with some style. You can see how they shaped the sink to form the letters spelling "AOpen". It looks pretty slick.

Sitting on the edge of the board, beside the four memory DIMMs, are the 24-pin ATX power connector and the single IDE 100 connection.

The bottom four pins of the ATX power connector are covered over making it easy if your PSU only has the 20-pin connector.

The other IDE connections, as well as the SATA jobbers, are located just to the side of the Southbridge heatsink.

Our FDD is positioned at the very bottom of the board, below the PCI slots. You can also get a good look here at the PCI-Express x16 and x1 slots.

Moving our tour right along, we have the back panel with all it's goodies.

Four USB ports, FireWire, Gigabit LAN, and 7.1 channel sound make up the highlights back here. Of course, there's the two COM ports, parallel port and the PS2 mouse and keyboard.

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