Thursday, December 09, 1999

The features (continued)

Other features included with the AOpen MX64, include: a AGP 4X port, an integrated AC"97 sound card, Wake on LAN, Wake on Modem Ring, PS/2 connectors, USB connectors, RX/TX infrared connectors, start-up from the mouse/keyboard/pre-set time, and Power Faliure Recovery. As well, hardware monitoring of fan speed, and of CPU temperature is included as a standard feature on this PC99 compliant motherboard.

Below, a photo of the AOpen MX64 provides us with a good view of its components.

Installation

As with other motherboards of this type, the AOpen MX64 is fairly simple to install. All that is truly required is take a short trip through the BIOS, as - unless you wish to force the system to 133Mhz - there are no jumpers to set.

The software bundle

The installation CD contains: the 4-in-1 driver pack from VIA, drivers for the AC"97 sound card, a utility for monitoring the hardware, a CD version of the users manual, and Adobe's Acrobat Reader for reading PDF files. Also, Norton Crash Card, and Norton Antivirus are included as a bonus.

Remarks

Apart from the odd idea of installing only 3 PCI slots, and no ISA slot - something I find a bit questionable - I find very little to object to; other than the fact that it would have been nice to have the option to change the processor's core voltage.

As concerns included materials, you should know that the MX64 comes with a pair of USB connectors, mounted on a support that can be placed in the expansion ports to the rear of the computer. This allows the support of multiple USB channels that can be switched on, off from within the BIOS.

Finally, note that the MX64 is delivered not only with IDE, and floppy disk drives cables, but also with an 80-wires ATA66 hard disk drive cable.

Suite: The Test Results.

Features

Support Intel Celeron, Pentium II , Pentium III CPU

Support Intel Celeron, Pentium II , Pentium III CPU

Support 133Mhz CPU Front Side Bus

Support PC133 & VC133 (Virtual Channel Memory) DIMM

Jumper-less

CPU clock ratio from 1.5X to 8.0X

16 sets of FSB clock from 66Mhz to 150Mhz

AGP 4X/2X/1X

AC'97 2.1 Audio support/Audio CODEC onboard

4 Channel USB Ports (Additional USB Cable included)

Support Ultra DMA/66 HDD (Additional UDMA 66 Cable included)

Over Current Protection Circuit

CPU Thermal Protection Circuit

System Voltage Monitoring

CPU and Housing Fan monitoring

Wake-On-Lan

Zero Voltage ake-On-Modem

Wake-On-Timer

PCI Rev 2.2 Compliant

Resetable Fuse Providing Short Circuit Protection for Keyboard and USB Device

AC Poer on Auto Recovery

PC99 Color coded I/O Connector

Suspend to Disk/Suspend to RAM

Year 2000 Compliant

AOpen Bonus Pack CD (Norton Anti-Virus included)