AOpen AX6BC-Pro Slot 1 Motherboard
Reviewed by Vijay Anand (28/6/99)
Motherboard Specifications |
Processor |
- Intel Celeron® Processor
266MHz-466MHz (66Mhz).
- Intel Pentium® II
Processor 233MHz-366MHz (66Mhz).
- Intel Pentium® II
Processor 350MHz-450MHz (100Mhz)
- Intel Pentium® III
Processor 450MHz-550MHz (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 8/16/32/64/128/256 MB DIMM
Module
- Supports SDRAM PC66 & 100(Supports
ECC, 72 bit)
- Supports 8MB to 768MB DRAM Size
- Supports
66/75/83/100/103/112/117/124/127/133/138/143/148/153 MHz System
Clock Speed Setting
- Supports
1.5-8.0 Multiplier Setting
|
PCI
IDE |
- 2 X PCI Bus Master UDMA/33 IDE ports
(up to 4 ATAPI Devices)
- Supports for PIO Mode 3, 4, UDMA/33
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
|
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
|
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><Rating>
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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 which sells 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 it's 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 AX6BC-Pro, which is a souped up version
of the AX6BC. The Pro version is equipped with overclocking-friendly
features, which I shall share with you all later. AOpen has truly listened
to the overclocking community and came up with a board especially for
them. Taking this opportunity, they've also relocated some components
that has made the board smaller which brings about more efficient usage
of the PCB and has passed on the savings to the end-users.
The contents of the usual AOpen box include the following: 1 AX6BC-pro
motherboard, 1 packet of FDD & HDD cable, 1 Drivers+Utility-CD, 1 Quick-Start
guide.
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The
Good
This board is equipped with a very
nice expansion configuration of 5 PCI, 2 ISA & 1 AGP-slot which I suppose
what most of us are looking for in a BX-based motherboard (but I do
know that there are a couple more people who will really need 6-PCI
slots to quench their currently maxed out 5-PCI slots for expansion,
like Anurax and CPU-Zilla and as for me I only need 3 PCI-slots with
the other slots as spacers!). Memory-wise, it has a respectable, 3-DIMM
slots to expand up to 768MB SDRAM using 256MB Registered-DIMMs. AOpen
left out the 4th DIMM to save cost and bring out the AX6BC-pro at a
more attractive price.
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 in-convenience 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.
A 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. Oh, BX chipset is covered by an attractive
AOpen heatsink with the words AOpen. The design itself gives a little
more surface area to absorb heat than most other heatsinks found on
other boards.
The AGP ratio jumper selector has
Auto, 1/1, 2/3 selections. Please read the manual that is provided in
PDF format that will tell you what CPU combinations + AGP ratio will
bring about what APG-bus speed. I've included here, the info from the
manual:
There is a reason I'm highlighting
this point. I was using a C-400 with a Riva-128 card at the beginning
of benchmarking and once I had the results from C-400, I switched to
a C-300A o/c to 450 and also swapped the video card with a Creative
TNT2-Ultra to benchmark both the motherboard with a another CPU and
the video-card. All this while, I had the AGP-Ratio set to Auto. So,
after making the switch, I decided to try out the Q2 results eagerly
with a new TNT2. But to my dismay, no 3D related stuff would run! I
didn't know what was wrong! I put the CPU back to 300Mhz and all the
games worked again. I couldn't make out what was wrong because I know
that the C-300A was working swell at 450Mhz all the while. I double-checked
it with my Canopus Riva-128 running at 450Mhz. The games worked again!
I started suspecting that the Creative TNT2 wasn't good or something
like it. I knew that the AGP-Ratio is 2/3 by default at 100Mzh bus,
so there shouldn't be any problem! So, I gave in and manually selected
a 2/3 AGP-ratio and running my CPU at 450Mhz. All my games worked fine!
I was delighted but puzzled. Launching the PDF-form manual from the
AOpen CD and browsing it gave me the table above which solved my question.
If you've understood what's happening so far, it means that the AOpen
board has more AGP-ratio settings depending on the CPU and FSB your
running. I was running a 66MHz-based CPU at 100Mhz-FSB, therefore, according
to the table in Auto selection, it means an AGP-ratio of 1/1 was running
or 100Mhz AGP-bus in my case. That means my Canopus Riva-128 was running
at 100Mhz bus flawlessly!! I can attribute this to the fact that Riva-128
cards use AGP 1x mode only, so some of them have the potential to run
at 100Mhz bus. Whereas the Creative TNT2 uses the AGP-2x bus by default,
hence it had trouble running at 100Mhz all the time, though it didn't
give any problem in Windows at all. What further puzzles me is the fact
that this is the 1st motherboard I've used so far that can boot and
run windows + play 3D games using my Canopus Riva-128 at 75Mhz AGP-bus
which I used to overclock my C-400. This is amazing because I've used
many boards including my own AOpen AX59pro board and all of them fails
to run my Riva-128 at anything more than 66Mhz-AGP bus. On this AX6BC-Pro
motherboard, I was able to use 75 & 100Mhz AGP-bus!! BUT 83Mhz bus failed
at DMI-verification. What gives here? I don't have to worry about my
RAM or HDD because I've run my HDD at 83Mhz bus in a few of my other
reviews using other video-cards at the time of testing. From all this,
I can conclude that my Canopus Riva-128 is a very weird card and that
this motherboard is awesome! I wonder if someone has an explanation
for me :)
Besides the AGP-Ratio and KB/Mouse power-on settings, all other setting
are made through the Award-Bios. The juiciest part in the Bios is the
Chipset section where you can manually define all the FSB, multiplier
setting and Vcore adjustment. There are a total of 16-FSB settings:
66,75,83,100,103,112,117/39,117/30,124,129,133,138,143,148,153MHz. Multipliers
support ranged from 1.5x to 8x and the voltage adjustment allows you
to control the Vcore of the CPU by 0.1V and 0.2V more than the suggested
voltage of a given CPU. I would have like to have 0.4V more but I guess
something is better than nothing. Considering the information I've given
so far, the motherboard resembles very much like the MSI-6163. Don't
you think so? I've not really looked into the clock & multiplier generators
for each board but I bet they are the same as the ones found in the
MSI counterpart. So far all looks good.
This AOpen motherboard has 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 later, or should the setting
get erased, you can always load it back from the EEPROM. Very nifty
and good for frequent fiddlers if u 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 AX6BC-Pro motherboard is cooler than all the motherboards I've used
so far (have not compared other AOpen boards). Part of the reason is
because this board uses High Efficiency Synchronous Switching Regulator
(as taken from the manual) which most of the current switching designs
are Asynchronous mode, which from a technical point of view, still consumes
very high power and generates heat. This motherboard implements a high
efficient synchronous switching design so that the temperature of MOS
FET is far less than the Schottky diode of the asynchronous design.
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:
The Manual has got a very nice front
and back cover but the contents are made up of recycled paper. It's
very informative with some benchmarks and diagrams but the presentation
method can improve as the 1st glance gives you a feeling that it's slightly
chaotic.
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The
Test
Test Configuration |
|
Processor(s): |
Celeron - 300A Retail SEPP, batch=SL32A, 2.0V, Malay Celeron - 400 Retail PPGA, batch=SL37X, 2.0V, Malay + Asus Slocket |
RAM: |
1 - 64MB LGS-7J PC100 SDRAM DIMM |
Hard
Drive(s): |
IBM Dekstar-3, 3.2Gb |
Video
Card(s): |
Canopus Total3D 128V AGP + 4MB SGRAM Creative TNT2-Ultra AGP + 32MB SDRAM |
Bus
Master Drivers: |
Windows 98 Bus Mastering
Drivers |
Video
Drivers: |
Canopus ver: 2.01.01 nVidia TNT2 Detonator drivers build 188 |
Operation
System(s): |
Windows 98 (build
4.10.1998) |
Wintune
98 Results
Area Tested |
AX6BC-pro C-400 (66x6) Riva-128 |
AX6BC-pro C-450 (100x4.5) TNT-2 |
BX2000 C-400 (66x6) Riva-128 |
BX2000 C-450 (100x4.5) Riva-128 |
CPU Integer (MIPS) |
1170.943 |
1317.73 |
1168.128 |
1314.488 |
CPU Floating Point (MFLOPS) |
459.8811 |
520.0772 |
460.6635 |
518.347 |
Video(2D) (MPixeles/s) |
88.13809 |
99.15589 |
84.43046 |
100.196 |
Direct3D (MPixeles/s) |
99.85226 |
192.5483 |
100.9557 |
102.0954 |
OpenGL (MPixels/s) |
70.078 |
157.5598 |
70.06438 |
70.82302 |
Memory (MB/s) |
690.5566 |
808.3422 |
682.373 |
795.2197 |
Cached Disk (MB/s) |
73.15141 |
85.30994 |
70.33907 |
87.14457 |
Uncached Disk (MB/s) |
1.760729 |
1.918296 |
1.904453 |
1.943452 |
** Do not compare the AX6BC-Pro motherboard's video scores using the C-450 CPU as it's using the Creative TNT2-Ultra and the others are using the Canopus Total3D 128V. **
ZD WinBench/WinStone-99, Norton SI & Sisoft Sandra-98
CPU speed |
AX6BC-pro
C-400A (66 x 6) Riva-128 |
AX6BC-pro
C-450A (100 x 4.5) TNT-2 |
BX2000
C-400A (66 x 6) Riva-128 |
BX2000
C-450A (100 x 4.5) Riva-128 |
ZD CPU-Mark99 |
30.7 |
36.9 |
30.3 |
37 |
ZD FPU-WinMark99 |
2130 |
2410 |
2130 |
2400 |
ZD Business Winstone99 |
16.8 |
17.8 |
15.9 |
17.4 |
NU Sys Info (pts) |
128.7 |
153.5 |
116.7 |
160.0 |
Sisoft CPU benchmark (MIPS) |
961 |
1077 |
956 |
1075 |
Sisoft FPU benchmark (MFLOPS) |
241 |
271 |
240 |
271 |
Sisoft memory benchmark (MB/s) |
163 |
210 |
182 |
210 |
These are just formal test results tested in my CPU's at my test-bench.
Since the more established MSI-6163 is the real competitor to the AOpen
in terms of brand, stability, cost and motherboard features (Abit isn't
as stable and trouble-free enough in my opinion after using one), I decided
to head down to CPU-Zilla's place a few days back to do some informal-tests
with both my AOpen and his MSI board (both were on loan) using a P2-350
and Spectek-128MB SDRAM. On the MSI, we were able to use 143MHz flawlessly
(made sure by WinStone) and 148MHz would even work surprisingly well when
the system is cool. In comparison, the AOpen can only do 138mhz flawlessly,
143Mhz would load Windows but will hang as soon as it's taxed like when
a benchmark is run and 148Mhz can only post!
This test alone is good enough to show that the MSI can handle very high bus-speeds better than AOpen. One more thing to note is that MSI constantly produced higher Sisoft Memory-benchmark scores in overclocked situations, as much as 10MB/s more. Both CPU-Zilla and myself could have run more benchmarks, especially Winstone but time was the main constraint for both of us, hence I could not get any proper benchmarks to log into the above tables.
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The Bad
Eventhough it as 16-FSB's, it's not good enough as it lacks several FSB's
like 105, 107, 110, 115Mhz and some others which were present in the DFI's
BX and ZX motherboards. Those are really useful bus-speeds for overclocking.
Also there isn't a 1/2-AGP divider that is useful for isolating the video
card when using bus-speeds like 133Mhz.
PPGA CPUs using Slockets don't seem to have firm grip with the URM and
the system may restart if the Slocket rocks slightly. Another flaw is
that it has trouble taking in SECC-2 packaged processors! I mean it's
not as easy as putting a SEPP, SECC or a slocket but due to the design
of the URM, a SECC-2 packaged processor will be blocked by some overhang
plastic of the URM. You can use more force and push it in but AOpen could
have come up with a better design.
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 and others are bunched into one corner which is not
easy to pull out and put back if the board and 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. A possible heat accumulating area
because of the floppy cable going over the CPU.
If this is a board aimed at overclockers, what happened to the 3rd fan-connector?
Saving cost again AOpen? 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 motherboard and this has made it a better value
for money as both boards are priced similarly. And the biggest complain
of all 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, it's very irritating to find out the motherboard features, its
offerings and many meanings of the Bios menu from the CD. A Normal motherboard
booklet like that bundled with older AOpen motherboards would be very
useful. I hope AOpen is reading this review, as I believe that the manual
is really a MUST for a company with good reputation and caliber, and considering
how much effort they have put into designing the motherboard.
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Conclusion
From my benchmarks, I find that the AX6BC-Pro is a very fast board compared
to the already fast competition. Good overclocking features like voltage
control, Bios controlled CPU settings, 16-FSB's, good expansion, Saving
of settings in EEPROM, nearly jumperless, very fast performance, extremely
stable, quality components and everything else you need is available on
this board. It is another board for overclockers to seriously consider.
AOpen had a great motherboard with the AX6BC, now with the Pro, they have
nearly come to a full circle to achieving a near-ideal BX-based motherboard!
Now, if only its price-tag was a tad less, it would have been an ir-resistable
board =)
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Overall
Rating
(Out of a maximum of 5 Star)
|
Installation |
****1/2 |
Performance |
***** |
Price |
**** |
Overclockability |
****1/2 |
Material
Quality |
***** |
Stability |
***** |
Overall
Rating |
***** |
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is provided courtesy of,
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© 1999 by Singapore
Hardware Zone. All rights reserved.
None of the above
shall be reproduced, copied and/or
modified without the permission of the WebMaster.
|