Friday, August 14, 1998

Introduction

The Aopen AX6B motherboard is really a great piece of hardware. This motherboard has so much features that it is hard to believe that someone could make use of all of them!

A quick look at the circuit board reveal an excellent design where Aopen engineers really showed what they could do.

The layout of this motherboard has been superbly designed and no lost space can be found. There are plenty of expansion possibilities with the four PCI, three ISA and one AGP slots combined with the four Dimm's memory banks to allow almost any combination one could wish. Some peoples might however prefer five PCI slots against only two ISA slot but in my opinion AOpen did the best move by going with four PCI and three ISA slots because 2D/3D combination graphic cards are now becoming very popular and will tend to establish a new standard in the next few months so using this type of graphic card will free a PCI slot and therefore there is no more absolute necessity for five PCI slots for most of the users while only two ISA slots might represent a complicated situation for some users.

To let you better appreciate the design is this wonderful motherboard I included a picture of it right here. Please note that the Chipset is actually showed without its attached heatsink.

The features

Among the most interesting features supported by this motherboard there is the "Suspend To Hard Drive", the "Zero Voltage Modem Wake Up", the "Lan Wake Up", the "Battery-less operation" and the "Jumper-less design". The Suspend To Hard Drive feature is allowing you to create a hard disk drive image of your what is stored into your computer main memory at the moment you shut down your computer. By turning on this feature you can come back directly at the point you were in your work without going through the whole booting process when you turn on your computer. The Zero Voltage Modem Wake up is a feature that allow you to turn on your computer on a single ring of your telephone so to use it remotely if your setup is done accordingly. The Lan Wake up is a function similar to the preceding one but it works through a local network area instead of a modem. The Battery-Less operation of this motherboard is enabled by having your computer constantly plugged to an AC outlet. This way you can remove the battery without loosing your settings and if a power failure happens, the EEPROM can be used to restore your settings if you took the precaution to save them once you were satisfied with your setup. Finally, the jumper-less design allow the user to take advantage of all CPU settings including voltages, FSB frequency and multiplier to be automatically choosen by the VID signal and SMbus clock generator accordingly to the CPU detected.

The Benchmarks

The tests were all performed under Win95.

The system setup was as following:

Motherboard: AOpen AX6B
CPU: Intel Pentium II 350mhz
Memory: 128mb PC100 SDram (LGS)
IDE first channel Primary port: Quantum Fireball EIDE ST 3.2A
IDE second channel Primary port: AOPEn CD-ROM drive CD-936E
PCI slot number 2: Matrox Millenium 4Wram graphic card
ISA slot number 2: Ensoniq Soundscape soundcard
ISA slot number 1: US Robotic 56k X2 modem
OS: Win95n 4.00.950

The first benchmark used was Winbench98 CPU Mark32 test. This test has been performed 3 times in a row and the results are displayed down below.

Winbench98 CPUmark 32

The next test I used was also from the Winbench98 test suite but this time I used the FPU Winmark to gauge the math co-processor of this CPU. Here are the results.

Winbench98 FPU Winmark

Finally, here are the results obtained on the Winstone98 tests suite. Many motherboards can't complete this test so running this test three times in a row successfully is a good indication of a stable computer system.

Winstone98 Tests suite

Like most of you already knows, todays motherboards performance are quite close from each others. So, something else than just performance measurements must be accomplished if we wish to get a better idea of the real value of a motherboard when we are evaluating it. The following table is an evaluation grid I developed to get a more precise idea of the overall quality of a motherboard. It gives a figure of merit taken upon twenty points by which anybody can get a quick evaluation of the good and weak points of a motherboard. The results is an overall quality indices which can be used to compare a given motherboard against any other motherboard of its category.

The above evaluation grid is now clearly showing the real value of this motherboard by giving to it a very good score of 88 points out of a possibility of 100 points maximum. As a fact, the more we will use this grid the more we will see why some top performer motherboards are not recommendable while some others with a tad less performances can fit your needs in a much better way. Buying a motherboard is not only a question of performance but it also implies usability, stability and expendability among the most important things and this is precisely where will come this evaluation grid to help us.

The strong points

This isn't an easy task to decide which are the strongest points of such a good motherboard. There is so many things I liked about it hat I just don't know where to begin with. The first features that comes in my mind is the four memory banks which are offering very good memory expansion possibilities. Next, is the ease of installation coming from the no jumper soft menu setup. The BIOS detects all by itself the right voltages, front side bus frequency and multiplier for the processor and this makes the installation of this motherboard almost a kid game. Finally, the software bundle and the superbly written user manual coming with this motherboard are the icing on the cake. AOpen choosed to give many very interesting softwares on the CD included with this motherboard and it shows how this company cares about its client by offering to them products not only well designed but also including tools to use them at their best.

The weak points

There is not much things I really disliked about this motherboard. The worst thing I've found on this motherboard is its memory bank sockets. I think that it is very annoying to find so cheap sockets on a so good motherboard and I think that AOpen could have made a much better choice by using higher grade sockets. The next thing is the Chipset Features setup menu which in my opinion is not offering enough memory tweaking possibilities. I've found much more memory settings in much cheaper motherboards and I think that AOpen could have included more memory settings to allow the users to fine tune their system to their own tastes. Finally, I would have like to have the possibility to set different CPU voltages on my own but AOpen choosed not to offer this possibility on this board so we are stuck with the voltages that the BIOS chooses accordingly to the CPU it detects.

Conclusions

Maybe that this motherboard is not the perfect motherboard but it is pretty close to it and I wouldn't be shy to recommend it to everybody looking for a good motherboard upgrade especially if it is your first Pentium II motherboard. This motherboard is in my opinion one of the best PII motherboard available on the market on this moment.

After I upgraded my system to use OSR2 as my new OS I found a good performance improvement especially due to the fact that the Bus Master was now working correctly. So, I decided to make some more tests on my system and to do so I used Winstone98. The conclusions of these tests were unquestionnable and were clearly demonstrating that Winstone98 is not in any way a processor Benchmark but a Benchmark measuring the overall performance of a computer system. As a fact, by having the Bus Master feature of my IED controllers enabled, Winstone98 showed gain a performance increase of around 7%. Most of this performance gain was coming from the lower CPU usage of my hard disk drive combined to a slighly higher transfer rate of my hard disk drive because the Bus master feature has been enabled. To better demonstrate these test results I included the actual tests results I obtained from Winstone98 with the Bus Master feature enabled on my IDE hard disk drive controllers. No hardware has been changed between the two tests so you can compare with the preceding Winstone98 tests displayed.

Winstone98 second test serie