AOPEN AX6BC

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Aopen AX6BC Motherboard
by Lester Sim and Overclocker (20/9/98)

The Aopen AX6BC motherboard is the latest in the lineup of Intel BX chipset motherboards from this company. It sports a 5 PCI / 2 ISA configuration compared to it's older sibling, the AX6B which has 4PCI / 3 ISA slots. The number of peripheral cards that are now using the PCI bus is readily increasing, ranging from video cards right down to sound cards. Not surprisingly, the PC 98 specifications call for the system bus to contain PCI bus expansion slots only and no ISA expansion slots, spelling an end soon to the ISA legacy. There are however, only 3 DIMM slots, compared with the more normal 4 which many motherboards now have. This should not be a problem unless you are planning to use more than 768Mb of RAM on your system.

First looks at the motherboard show it to be a typical ATX layout, however the floppy drive's connector is placed on the far side of the CPU slot which is a little strange. Installation is easy enough. Simply seat the motherboard into the casing and secure it, plug in the power connector and the peripherals and you are ready to go. Upon powering up, the system POSTs and shows that I have my trusty Celeron 266Mhz as my processor. The BIOS revision is quite recent and I suspect that it is the latest update. The system runs without any problems at this speed(of course!), so it's time to start experimenting overclocking. The BIOS setup has a menu to set the system bus speed and the CPU clock multiplier. This is quite common nowadays, as more mainboards are becoming jumperless. There is however, no provision to alter the CPU core voltage, a nice option for those who want to experiment overclocking of their CPUs. The system bus speed can set at 66/75/83/100/103/112/133 Mhz. My Celeron 266 is locked at a multiplier of 4X, so changing the multiplier setting has no effect. I immediately set the bus speed to 100Mhz as I'm quite sure that the system will still POST with the CPU at 400Mhz. The system boots and runs Windows without a hitch. I decide to increase the system bus speed to 103Mhz then to 112Mhz. I'm glad to report that the system will run up to speeds of 450Mhz quite stabily.The system had a data error once at 450Mhz, but I think that my HDD is to blame for that. There was never a chance of booting the system at 133Mhz, the system will not even POST. I believe that the highest stable speed I would want to overclock my system is at 400Mhz where the CPU temperature hovers at about a cool 30 degrees.

Feature wise, this motherboard has the usual slew of features now common amongst the BX mainboards plus many monitoring and safety features for protecting your peripherals cards and the CPU from overheating and voltage fluctuations. The CD-ROM that accompanies the mainboard contains bus mastering utilities, a hardware utility for monitoring system temperature and voltage and a bonus of the highly acclaimed Norton AntiVirus as well as Norton CrashGuard.

I have not run any extensive tests on the mainboard yet other than Wintune and Quake II's timedemo test, but judging from the results, this board is quite capable, though not excelling in any particular area. It's strengths are in its features and stability and of course an additional PCI expansion slot over most of the competition.

Key Features

	Support Intel New Generation Microprocessor Pentium II
	Jumper-Less, Battery-Less Design
	Support 100Mhz FSB (Clock Generator Support up to 133Mhz)
	Switching Mode Voltage Regulator and CPU Voltage Auto-Detect
	AGP/AGP Turbo Support
	CPU & Housing Fan Monitoring
	System Voltage Monitoring
	Thermal Protection
	CPU core Over Current protection
	Ultra DMA/33 Bus Master IDE support
	RTC Wake up Timer
	Zero Voltage Modem Wake up
	LAN Wake up
	2Mb Flash ROM BIOS with ACPI support for PC98/Win’98
	Suspend-To-Hard-Drives
	Multi-Language BIOS Support
	BIOS Virus Protection Function
	Support DMI (Desktop Management Interface) Function
	Support USB Hot Plug Function
	Resetable Fuse Providing Short Circuit Protection for Keyboard and USB Device
	SB-LINK Connector Support
	AOpen Bonus Pack (Norton Anti-Virus included)
	FCC DoC & CE approved

Specifications

	CPU Intel Pentium II CPU 233~333Mhz(66Mhz), 350~450Mhz(100Mhz)
	ASIC Intel 440BX AGPset
	Architecture 2 ISA slots + 5 PCI slots +1AGP slots
	Max. Main Memory 768 MB SDRAM or Registered SDRAM for DIMM X 3
	DIMM Type 8/16/32/64/128/256 MB
	BIOS Award Plug and Play Flash ROM BIOS
	On Board I/O 2 Serial Ports (UART 16C550 Supported) 1 Parallel Port (SPP/EPP/ECP Supported) 2 Floppy Drive supported (1.2/1.44/2.88MB) 2 Channe IDE (Mode 4 and Ultra DMA/33 Bus Mastering Supported) 2 USB ports supported (Universal Serial Bus)

	Battery 3V Lithium Battery
	Green Function Yes
	Board Size 224mm x 305mm, ATX Form Factor

My System Components

	CPU - Celeron 266Mhz
	Memory - 64Mb Hyundai PC100 SDRAM
	HDD - IBM Deskstar 4.3Gb
	CD-ROM - Aztech 6X Speed
	Video Card - Virge DX 4Mb
	3D Card - Voodoo2 8Mb
	Sound Card - Aureal A3D

WinTune 98

Offline Test Results

CPU	(1) Intel Celeron@400 MHz
Video Board	S3 ViRGE-DX/GX PCI (375/385)
Video Mode	800x600@24bits/pixel
RAM	64 MB
OS	Windows 98 4.10.1998

Area Tested	Value
CPU Integer	1165.492 MIPS
CPU Floating Point	464.671 MFLOPS
Video(2D)	23.49147 MPixels/s
Direct3D	11.90259 MPixels/s
OpenGL	7.547542 MPixels/s
Memory	604.4368 MB/s
Cached Disk	61.4527 MB/s
Uncached Disk	2.549225 MB/s

GL Quake II Timedemo Test Results @400Mhz

Video Mode	Frames per Second
640x480@75Mhz	69
800x600@75Mhz	58

20 September 1998 14:26