Monday, December 03, 2001

Introduction

AOpen has always been quick to update its product-line when a new chipset hits the market. So, its shouldn't come as any great surprise that they recently released the AX4BS Pro - a Socket 478, Pentium 4-compatible motherboard based on the recently released i845 chipset. If you've been keeping up - this is only the second such board we've tested - you'll know that the i845 only supports conventional PC133 SDRAM memory. In our opinion, this type of board isn't destined for great success. The relatively restrained bandwidth of PC133 memory tends to really drag-down the performance of the Pentium 4, which was, after all, designed with Direct RAMBUS memory in-mind. In any case, we can't blame board-manufacturers for that; it's Intel that designed the i845 after all. There's no doubt that if Intel had opted to support DDR-SDRAM with the i845, it would have had a much better life in front of it. In short, though, we'll be keeping a close eye on performance throughout this article. Bear in mind that the new rendition of the I845 that support DDR-SDRAM was not available on the market when we tested this mobo.

So, without further ado, it's time to get on with the show.

Configuration

Configuration of the AOpen AX4BS is an entirely jumperless affair, as there are no on-board jumpers that relate to the CPU.

As you can tell from the table above, it's possible to adjust the Vcore voltage from within the BIOS.

Another BIOS function also allows the FSB frequency to be set to between 100MHz and 200MHz. That said, it should be noted that the FSB is adjusted in odd increments of between 3MHz and 5MHz, as determined by the frequency.

The memory bus frequency is also adjustable - it can be set to either 100MHz or 133MHz - as are a variety of memory timing options, which can be adjusted from within the "Advanced Chipset Features" menu.

Next: Technical details