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General Specs and Overview:
The specs on the board itself are pretty standard for a good 845E board, but you will notice that AOpen had to sacrifice a few things in order to fit all the Tube circuitry onto a regular sized motherboard, most notably, there are only 3 PCI slots on this board. Features wise you have integrated 10/100Mbps LAN, USB2.0 via 2 onboard USB ports, and of course, the very fancy integrated audio with a specially designed expansion bracket that AOpen recommends for the highest quality audio output.
Whats missing? Aside from having only 3 PCI slots, you will note that the package doesnt come with an expansion bracket for more USB slots, like a lot of other current motherboards (we usually see at least 4 total USB ports on motherboard packages). The board supports up to 6 USB 2.0 ports, but youd have to buy an expansion bracket yourself, separately. You also dont have IDE RAID, but for all intents and purposes, AOpens engineers did a really good job with deciding what to keep and what to cut out. If you look at the layout pictures of the board, you can see that the Tube circuitry takes a large chunk of the boards real estate. In spite of this, we were impressed by what WASNT lacking, like AOpens Dr Voice II voice based boot diagnostics, and AGP Protection (against older, 3.3V AGP cards, which can damage 845 chipsets).
You can also see from the pictures that this is a very good looking board with AOpens signature black PCB, a gold coloured aluminum chipset heatsink, the Vacuum Tube itself and its surrounding components, and a little plaque like sticker signifying the use of TubeSound Technology (adding badges and stickers like this is also one of AOpens little trademark touches). This is a board that will look very nice indeed with a modified case with window and lighting. Layout wise, too, theres little wrong with the design. The location of most of the elements are in good places, though the AGP slot is still too close to the RAM, in this case were going to have to give AOpen some slack for this, since the Tube components do take up a good 1/5th of the lower part of the board. BIOS and Overclocking Features Before I start talking about the BIOS and overclocking features in the BIOS, I wanted to talk about a very special feature that AOpen has implemented on the board. They call it the Watch Dog Timer, which is a system similar to what other manufacturers have used before to prevent jumperless boards from just hanging and requiring a manual CMOS clear via the CMOS jumper. What Watch Dog Timer does is detect whether the last POST attempt was successful. If the last attempt was a failure, it will restart the system with default values after 5 seconds (you can even manually restart the system by pressing the [ Home ] key). This is a godsend for those of us looking to push the system. Remember during our MSI KT4 Ultra review when I complained about the system giving us black screens when we were overzealous with our overclocking attempts? With the KT4 Ultra and many other boards, we have to clear the CMOS via the CMOS jumpers. Not so with the AOpen AX4B. (Right now Im reviewing a board that doesnt even have a CMOS clear jumper K). Ok on to BIOS overclocking features:
There are no adjustments for DRAM or AGP voltage on this board, and you cant set the multiplier. There are memory timings adjustments for those of you who tweak your RAM, but the board will only accept up to 266Mhz for the clock speed setting.
next: Performance and Testing »
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