AOpen AX63-Pro Slot 1 Motherboard
Reviewed by Vijay Anand (4/8/99)
Motherboard Specifications
|
Processor
|
- Intel
Celeron® Processor 266MHz-500MHz (66Mhz).
- Intel
Pentium® II Processor 233MHz-366MHz (66Mhz).
- Intel
Pentium® II Processor 350MHz-450MHz (100Mhz)
- Intel
Pentium® III Processor 450MHz-600MHz (100Mhz)
- Slot 1
Socket for Future Expansion.
|
Chipset
|
|
Cache
memory
|
- CPU Built-in
128KB/512KB L2 cache for Celeron/Pentium II Processor
|
System
Memory
|
- 3 x 168-pin 3.3v DIMM
sockets support
- Supports 8/16/32/64/128
MB DIMM Module
- Supports SDRAM
PC66, PC100, PC133(Supports ECC, 72 bit)
- Supports 8MB
to 768MB DRAM Size
- Supports 66/75/83/100/103/112/117/124/127/133/138/143/150/158
MHz System Clock Speed Setting
- Supports 1.5-8.0
Multiplier Setting
|
PCI
IDE
|
- 2 X PCI Bus
Master UDMA/66 IDE ports (up to 4 ATAPI Devices)
- Supports
for PIO Mode 3, 4, UDMA/33, UDMA/66 IDE & ATAPI CD-ROM
|
I/O
Interface
|
- 1x floppy
port (360KB-2.88MB)
- 2x serial
ports (16550 high-speed)
- 1x parallel
port (SPP/EPP/ECP)
- PS/2 Keyboard
- PS/2 Mouse
- 2x USB
- I/O interface
is coloured to PC99 spec
|
Expansion
slot
|
- 5 x PCI
32-bit slots, PCI 2.1 compliant
- 2 x ISA
16-bit slots
- 1x AGP
(1x & 2x Mode, 66/133MHz) slot
- Supports Creative PCI
Sound Card SB-Link.
|
Power
Management
|
- Power
On by LAN, RTC Alarm, Modem ring on,
Keyboard & Mouse
& Soft-Power Switch
- Power
Off by Windows® 95 Shut down & Soft-Power Switch
- Supports
3 Level ACPI LED
- Suspend
to HDD support.
|
Form
Factor
|
- ATX Form
Factor, 4 layer PCB
- Fits in
Regular ATX Case
- ATX Connector
on Board
- Double
Deck ATX Back Panel
|
BIOS
|
- 2 Mbit
(256KB) FLASH RAM
- Award
PCI BIOS with Green, PnP, DMI, INT13 (HD>8.4)and Anti-Virus
Functions
- LS120,
ZIP, ATAPI CD-ROM, IDE #1, #2, #3, #4 Bootable
- Battery-less
storage of CMOS setup configurations
|
<Introduction><The Good><The Test><The Bad><Conclusion>
<The PC133 Test><CPU-Zilla's
Conclusion><Rating>
Back to top
Introduction
We all know who Acer is, don't we? It is one
of the most successful PC companies of Taiwan, which now is an International
Corporation that sell PCs mostly made from their own components. They
also manufacture lots of other peripherals and are the 2nd largest
motherboard manufacturer in the world. Now some of you might ask what
Acer has got to do with an AOpen motherboard. Since Acer is such a
large company, they have a sister-company called AOpen, which stands
for Acer-Open division (now you know why it's called AOpen?). This
division produces far better products than Acer itself and also does
its own research for new innovations (not that Acer isn't good but
AOpen still does it better). Over time, AOpen has built itself a nice
reputation of the most stable and well performing motherboards in
the industry. Have a look at Jackie's trip to Taiwan, where he visited
the AOpen factory (lots of interesting pictures await you!).
The board I'm reviewing here is an AX63-Pro, which is a new version
of the AX63. The Pro version is now using VIA's latest chipset, Apollo
PC133. What makes this chipset outstanding is that it officially support
133Mhz FSB, meaning the chipset is equipped with proper dividers to
bring down AGP-bus to 66Mhz, PCI-bus to 33Mhz and any other minority
buses to proper official speeds as compared to the Intel-BX at 133Mhz
FSB. UDMA-66 is also supported with the 2 IDE connectors. The whole
board is based upon the AOpen AX6BC-Pro (and a bit of the older AX63)
as physically all the layouts is the same and so are the offered features
with only the chipsets that have been changed.
The contents of the well known AOpen box include the following: 1
AX63-Pro motherboard, 1 packet of FDD & HDD cable, 1 UDMA-66 cable,
1 Drivers+Utility-CD, 1 Quick-Start manual.
Back to top
The
Good
This board is equipped similarly like the AX6BC-Pro
with 5 PCI, 2 ISA & 1 AGP-slot which, I suppose what most of us are
looking for in a typical motherboard with a 6-PCI motherboard as a
bonus (like the Asus P3B-F). Memory-wise, it has an adequate 3-DIMM
slots to expand up to 768MB SDRAM (this Apollo PC133 supports up to
1.25GB SDRAM). The Apollo PC133 chipset supports many unusual memory
standards like VCM/HSDRAM Support. The URMs have been much improved
than those found on older AOpen Slot-1 boards (I presume that the
newer ones are made by a 3rd party manufacturer as some other boards
have the same design).
The board is tad bigger and spacious than many other BX motherboards
of its category and the result is that most connectors are easily
accessible without any hindrance. Examples are the HDD and Power connectors,
which are located in front of the DIMM slots. In this board, there
is an adequate gap between the DIMM slots and the above mentioned
connectors but in many other boards those same connectors are nearly
flushed against the DIMM slots, causing inconvenience to use the 1st
DIMM slot. Other jumpers and connectors on board are the IrDA, WOL,
WOM, FAN (2), CMOS-Clear jumper, KB/Mouse power-on jumpers, AGP-Ratio
and our usual casing connectors. An SB-Link connector is also available
for some PCI cards such as the Yamaha-192XG WaveForce that gives you
legacy DOS sound support. Cards such as the Creative-Live do not use
this connector. The ATX back-panel is colour-coded according to the
PC99 specification for easy identification and plugging in of connectors.
The VIA Apollo PC133's Northbridge has a gold-coloured heatsink with
the words VIA PC133 and VIA's logo. I'm not sure if the heatsink is
really gold-plated or just gold-coloured.
I find it a bit odd but this board has 3 different
jumper settings for 3 different FSB ranges. You'll then have to enter
the BIOS to select the exact FSB you require. The 3 ranges of FSB
are 66 to 83Mhz, 90 to 124Mhz and 124 to 155Mhz. Alternatively, you
still have the Auto selection jumper setting too. The following is
a tiny part I took out from the PDF manual for reference:
Anyway here are all the FSB settings available: 66, 75, 78, 81, 83,
90, 95, 100, 105, 110, 112, 113.5, 115, 117, 118.5, 120, 124, 126,
133, 135, 137, 138.5, 140, 142, 144, 150, 155MHz, a total of 27 FSB
settings! So the overclocking prospects are very good with this board
coupled with the 0.1 or 0.2V increase of Vcore voltage in the BIOS.
I've included here, the info from the manual:
Remember, the VIA Apollo PC133 has an Asynchronous
memory bus speed, hence you can use an FSB of 100mhz and still use
PC66 rams at 66Mhz or use an FSB of 66Mhz and use PC100 rams running
at 100mhz. Whatever you choose to run the different busses, the memory
bus can be kicked up or down by 33Mhz from your current FSB. This
is set in the Bios under the Chipset-section. Here's another snip
from the PDF manual for a clearer picture of how this feature works:
AOpen motherboards have a unique feature in which it allows you to
save your Bios settings in EEPROM. This motherboard can also sustain
the BIOS information in CMOS without the Lithium battery (but it's
provided anyway) and use your power-supply instead. So long the power
is connected to your motherboard, it will sustain the information.
Now, since AOpen does provide the conventional Battery just in case,
you don't have to worry about unplugging the power supply. If you
saved your BIOS settings in EEPROM, and should you change any settings
latter, or should the setting get erased, you can always load it back
from the EEPROM. Very nifty and good for frequent fiddlers if you
ask me :)
Suspend to Disk feature was first introduced by AOpen and it's still
available in most of their current motherboards. There are 2 methods
to implement it. The APM method is aimed at Win95 users and the ACPI
method is only for Win98. Below are more details of each, taken from
the manual:
APM Suspend To Hard Drive "Immediately" turns on system
and goes back to the original screen before power down. You can resume
your original work directly from hard disk without go through the
Win95 booting process and run your application again. Suspend to Hard
Drive saves your current work (system status, memory image) into hard
disk. Note that you have to use VESA compatible PCI VGA, Sound Blaster
compatible sound card with APM driver, for Suspend to Hard Drive to
work properly.
ACPI Suspend to Hard Drive The conventional "Suspend to
Hard Drive" function is a private design of AOpen motherboards, the
requirement to run it is a BIOS revision and correct chipset that
supports this function. However, nowadays "Suspend to Hard Drive"
has been become widely known as the "S4 - Hibernation" state defined
in the ACPI specification; in this case not only the BIOS itself but
also the operation system (i.e. Windows98) and even the display card
are involved in the execution of this function.
The correct way to go about implementing this feature is clearly described
in PDF-format manual. The APM method was much harder to set than the
ACPI method (this is similar to setting the STR function). Notice
that in the ACPI paragraph above, Suspend to HDD is known as S4 and
the Suspend To Ram is known as S3 (which I've explained in my i810
review and DFI PW65-D review). This obviously means S4 conserves even
more than S3, hence it takes longer to recover to the last used state
(also because HDD is slower than RAM).
The given CD comes with these software: Norton
Anti-Virus, Norton CrashGuard, Hardware Monitoring Utility, Product
Quality Assurance (PQA) tester, DocuCom Reader, Advanced Desktop Management
(ADM), AOchip, Manual and FAQ. This is the AOpen Hardware Monitoring
Utility:
Back to top
The
Test
Test Configuration
|
|
Processor(s): |
Celeron
- 300A Retail SEPP, batch=SL32A, 2.0V, Malay |
Motherboard(s): |
AOpen
AX63-Pro and AX6BC-Pro |
RAM: |
1
- 64MB LGS-7J PC100 SDRAM DIMM |
Hard
Drive(s): |
IBM
Dekstar-3, 3.2Gb |
Video
Card(s): |
Creative TNT2-Value AGP + 16MB SDRAM |
Bus
Master Drivers: |
VIA
Bus Mastering Drivers |
Video
Drivers: |
nVidia
TNT2 Detonator drivers build 188 |
Operation
System(s): |
Windows
98 (build 4.10.1998) |
Wintune
98 Results
Area Tested |
AX63-Pro
C-450
(100x4.5)
TNT-2 |
AX6BC-Pro
C-450
(100x4.5)
TNT-2 |
CPU Integer (MIPS) |
1317.684 |
1317.73 |
CPU Floating Point (MFLOPS)
|
519.9445 |
520.0772 |
Memory (MB/s) |
790.2954 |
808.3422 |
Cached Disk (MB/s) |
78.69019 |
85.30994 |
Uncached Disk (MB/s) |
2.161921 |
1.918296 |
ZD
WinBench/WinStone-99, Norton SI & Sisoft Sandra-99
CPU speed & mobo combo |
AX63-Pro
C-450A
(100 x 4.5)
TNT-2 |
AX6BC-Pro
C-450A
(100 x 4.5)
TNT-2 |
ZD CPU-Mark99 |
21.7 |
36.9 |
ZD FPU-WinMark99 |
2380 |
2410 |
ZD Business Winstone99 |
17.3 |
17.8 |
NU Sys Info (pts) |
123.6 |
153.5 |
Sisoft CPU benchmark (MIPS) |
1221 |
1226
|
Sisoft FPU benchmark (MFLOPS) |
602 |
602 |
Sisoft Multimedia benchmark (it/s) |
Integer MMX = 1141
FPU = 661 |
Integer MMX = 1141
FPU = 661 |
Sisoft Memory benchmark
Bandwidth(MB/s) |
CPU = 156
FPU = 146 |
CPU = 276
FPU = 257 |
3DMark99-MAX
On every test or benchmark, the results point out-right towards the
BX chipset. As I expected, VIA's weakness in memory bandwidth and
AGP implementation which brings down the scores quite a bit. What's
the use of a PC133 chipset to utilise 133Mhz RAMs when the overall
speed of the system is far below a system running an Intel BX chipset??
Well, if VIA's marketing is right, it can entice some OEM PC makers
and some other PC vendors to implement a VIA Apollo PC133 chipset
based motherboard just so that the vendor can add PC-133 compliant
as his selling point!
Back to top
The Bad
The number-one bad point would be the speed of the system due to
the use of this VIA Apollo PC133 board over the proven i440-BX chipset.
In every category, it is slower and especially in games because the
design of the AGP-bus or the accompanying drivers isn't as refined
as Intel's. The results speak for themselves. When I started the Winbench
and Winstone programs, there was a long pause, a pause I've never
encountered. I thought the system hung but it was just a long delay.
The same phenomenon happened in some other minor occasions but the
board and system still worked flawlessly. Even maneuvering through
the BIOS looks slow!
Given that we have 5 PCI slots and 2 ISA slots, only 4 PCI slots
and 1 ISA slot can truly use full-length cards. The reason I use the
word 'truly' is because there are some connectors located in front
of the 5th PCI and 2nd ISA slots and depending whether you connect
them or not, you'll have access to use full length cards on them.
The 5th PCI slot could be blocked by a Casing-Fan connector and the
2nd ISA slot can be blocked by some casing-connectors.
The LED connectors & others are bunched into one corner which is
not easy to pull out & put back if the board & other parts are all
fixed inside the case. Although it's labeled, it's hard to see them
within the case in one small corner.
The floppy connector is placed right at the back of the Slot-1, the
traditional place where AOpen places the floppy and power-supply connectors
but at least the big power connector is moved up front but the floppy
connector still remains there. I'm really curious what made AOpen
put the floppy connector in such an awkward position. I know that
floppy connector is now closer to the I/O controller but still, this
isn't a good excuse to position it behind the Slot-1 connector unlike
many other boards. It's a possible heat accumulating area because
of the floppy cable going over the CPU. You may try routing the floppy
cable below the motherboard.
If this is a board aimed at overclockers, what happened to the 3rd
fan-connector? I don't think this one should have been skipped. A
thermal-header, thermistor and some proper s/w would also have been
real useful like the MSI counterpart and this has made it a better
value for money as both boards are priced similarly. A bigger complain
other than the 3rd fan-connector would be the lack of a proper manual
in booklet form! It's now provided in a PDF-format on the AOpen CD.
Though setting up the board is easy with the use of the quick-start
manual, it's very irritating to find out of the motherboard features,
its offerings and many meanings of the BIOS menu from the CD. A normal
motherboard booklet like the ones bundled with older AOpen motherboards
would have been very useful. I do hope AOpen realise my constant complain
about the over-concised manual as I believe it is quite important
to portray a finished product for a company of its size and calibre,
and considering how much effort they have put into designing the motherboard.
Furthermore, there is no AGP-4X support, STR functions. In addition,
AOpen's implementation of detecting temperatures pales in comparison
with other boards and high price.
Back to top
Conclusion
I've no idea who to recommend this board to buy because it's priced
within $5 difference of the AX6BC-Pro!! Though this board works well,
performance is slacking and minor pauses may occur time to time. Maybe
a newer BIOS or drivers could iron some kinks out. But AOpen should
price this board effectively lower than its higher classed AX6BC-Pro
to at least win over people who want the newer/flexible features found
in the Apollo-Pro chipset. AOpen can say that they've included the
UDMA-66 cable but that doesn't warrant a price increase such that
both VIA and Intel models are priced similarly. As for now PC-133
support and UDMA-66 are the only major points the AX63-Pro has over
its AX6BC-Pro counterpart, but these 2 points are rather weak because
of the AX63-Pro's usage of VIA's Apollo PC133 chipset.
Back to top
The PC-133 Test
Updated by CPU-Zilla (14/8/99)
Once again, the benchmarks just never stop running even when we seem
to have finished reviewing the product. We managed to take the board
to a PC-133 test using the Pentium II-350 SL37F which can be easily
clocked up to a whopping 133MHz bus speed. Since my test system is
different from that of Vijay's the results I'm about to present here
are a little different in terms of the benchmarked scores, but you
should be able to make a pretty good comparison.
Test Configuration
|
|
Processor(s): |
Pentium
II-350 SL37F Philippines |
Motherboard(s): |
AOpen
AX63-Pro
MS-6163 Pro |
RAM: |
1 - 64MB Micron
PC133 SDRAM DIMM
1 - 128MB Micron PC133 SDRAM DIMM
(48LC8M8A2 -75B)
|
Hard
Drive(s): |
Quantum
Fireball EX 6.4GB |
Video
Card(s): |
Microstar NVidia Vanta (16MB) M8807 |
Bus
Master Drivers: |
VIA Bus Mastering
Drivers
(provided on CD)
Mircosoft
Windows 98 (2nd Edition) generic VIA Bus Mastering drivers
Latest VIA Bus
Mastering Drivers
from VIA's website (4-in-1 drivers v.4.11)
|
Video
Drivers: |
nVidia
Detonator drivers build 2.08 |
Operation
System(s): |
Windows
98 (2nd Edition) |
Firstly, let me say that overclocking the Pentium
II-350 was very easy with this board. There's little to worry about
the AGP and PCI clock speeds as they should be adjusted to the normal
value of 66MHz and 33MHz respectively. Unlike other BX motherboards
that can perform 133MHz, the AGP clock ratio used was still 2/3
of the bus speed which is actually running at about 88.66MHz. On
the other hand the PCI clock would have been 44MHz instead! However,
I do know the newer motherboards have proper PCI clock dividers
of 1/4 (1/4 x 133MHz = 33MHz). Anyway, here are more benchmark results
(drumroll)....
ZD Winstone
99 Results
Benchmark
|
133x3.5
(467MHz)
@CAS2
|
142x3.5
(497MHz)
@CAS3
|
AX63Pro (1)
|
23.2
|
23.7
|
AX63Pro (2)
|
23.2
|
23.7
|
AX63Pro (3)
|
23.5
|
24.0
|
MS-6163 Pro
|
23.5
|
-
|
ZD CPUmark
99 Results
Benchmark
|
133x3.5
(467MHz)
@CAS2
|
142x3.5
(497MHz)
@CAS3
|
144x3.5
(504MHz)
@CAS3
|
AX63Pro (1)
|
36.5
|
38.6
|
39.2
|
AX63Pro (2)
|
36.5
|
38.6
|
39.3
|
AX63Pro (3)
|
36.5
|
38.6
|
39.3
|
MS-6163 Pro
|
36.9
|
-
|
-
|
ZD FPU Winmark
Results
Benchmark
|
133x3.5
(467MHz)
@CAS2
|
142x3.5
(497MHz)
@CAS3
|
144x3.5
(504MHz)
@CAS3
|
AX63Pro (1)
|
2400
|
2550
|
2590
|
AX63Pro (2)
|
2400
|
2550
|
2590
|
AX63Pro (3)
|
2400
|
2550
|
2590
|
MS-6163 Pro
|
2400
|
-
|
-
|
ZD Business
Disk Winmark 99 Results
Benchmark
|
133x3.5
(467MHz)
@CAS2
|
142x3.5
(497MHz)
@CAS3
|
144x3.5
(504MHz)
@CAS3
|
AX63Pro (1)
|
3520
|
3250
|
3510
|
AX63Pro (2)
|
2520
|
2750
|
2720
|
AX63Pro (3)
|
2720
|
2720
|
2730
|
MS-6163 Pro
|
2740
|
-
|
-
|
ZD High-End
Disk Winmark 99 Results
Benchmark
|
133x3.5
(467MHz)
@CAS2
|
142x3.5
(497MHz)
@CAS3
|
144x3.5
(504MHz)
@CAS3
|
AX63Pro (1)
|
10900
|
11900
|
12500
|
AX63Pro (2)
|
9850
|
10100
|
10000
|
AX63Pro (3)
|
9820
|
9970
|
9970
|
MS-6163 Pro
|
9990
|
-
|
-
|
Note : (1)
using generic bus mastering drivers provided in Windows 98 Second
Edition
(2) using VIA bus mastering drivers provided in the CD-ROM
(3) using latest VIA bus mastering drivers (dated 14 August 1999).
VIA 4-in-1 v4.11
As we can see, the AOpen AX63 Pro performed pretty
well at 133MHz as compared to an Intel BX chipset based motherboard
(e.g. MS-6163 Pro). The CPU Mark99 was a little slower on the VIA
chipset, but both MS-6163 Pro and AX63Pro had the same score for
FPU and Winstone 99 benchmarks. However, the MS-6163 Pro seems to
have a slightly better disk performance as compared to the AX63Pro.
Note that the hard drive used in the benchmarks was only a UDMA33
hard disk. The Winstone and Disk Winmarks performance would have
looked better on the AX63Pro if a UDMA66 hard disk was used.
The generic bus mastering drivers installed by Windows
98 Second Edition performed surprisingly better than drivers written
by VIA as shown in the AX63Pro Disk Benchmarks. I didn't believe
the scores, so I went to download the latest version of the 4-in-1
drivers and installed it. What we see was a very slight performance
drop using the new drivers. This is indeed very puzzling to me.
Somehow, VIA still have yet to properly tune their bus mastering
drivers. Anyway, you should note that the generic drivers provided
in Windows 98 Second Edition may not be the most stable driver around,
although it worked fine during all my benchmarks. In addition, the
strange behaviour of these drivers seems to give varying disk benchmark
results as you can see from the inconsistencies tabulated above.
The scores fluctuate quite a bit and I cannot really pinpoint the
exact problem, so I used the best scores out of three different
separate runs.
Using Micron's latest PC133 SDRAMs, I was surprised
to find that these RAMs performed exceptionally well at 133MHz,
even when the CAS Latency was set to 2. However, when I tried to
use the same settings on the MS-6163 Pro, the system showed some
instability, especially when running the Winstone benchmarks. I
guess this is the factor that distinguishes the AX63Pro from the
MS-6163 Pro.
Back to top
CPU-Zilla's Conclusion
Overall, I find the AX63Pro to be a wonderful board
for 133MHz bus speeds. However, due to the non-existent nature of
CPUs with 133MHz specs, I doubt this board would ever get very popular.
Still, we should not underestimate Intel, as they may just introduce
133MHz CPUs in a desperate bid to divert the market's attention
away from AMD's forthcoming K7 processors. I think we will just
have to wait and see. But if you are dying to get your hands on
a PC133 chipset with UDMA66 capability, then I guess this board
is something that you could consider. Otherwise, your existing BX
motherboard would have been more than suffice your computing needs,
since we see very little difference between the Apollo Pro133 and
Intel 440BX chipsets at 133MHz operation.
Back to top
Overall
Rating
(Out of a maximum of 5 Star)
|
Installation |
**** |
Performance |
**** |
Price |
** |
Overclockability |
****1/2 |
Material
Quality |
****1/2 |
Stability |
**** |
Overall
Rating |
**** |
Back to top
This Product
is provided courtesy of,
Copyright
© 1998 by Singapore
Hardware Zone. All rights reserved.
None
of the above shall be reproduced, copied and/or
modified without the permission of the WebMaster.
|