Singapore Hardware Zone

AX6BC-pro mobo

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

  • Intel 82440 BX AGPset

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:

AOpen system monitor

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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MOTHERBOARD RATING

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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