AOpen AX63 Pro Apollo Pro 133 Slot-1 ATX

The Bad

The placement of the floppy drive interface connector at the top of the AX63's PCB requires the user to stretch the floppy cable over the processor in order to reach the motherboard. Imported from the AOpen AX6BC Pro Gold review is a picture of how to run the floppy drive underneath the motherboard to avoid the aforementioned issue.

AOpen's hardware monitoring capabilities have always been weak, and this fault continutes to be the case with the AX63 Pro. The chip for hardware monitoring is the Genesis Logic GL518SM - pretty much an AOpen only chip, used often on AOpen boards, but rarely seen from other manufacturers. There are only four voltages reported by the utility - +3.3V, +5V, +12V, and Vcore. The BIOS itself doesn't report temperature or voltage information - the only way to get such information is via software. There is a single thermistor mounted under the CPU socket which measures the CPU temperature. Unfortunately, this chip does not support reading the CPU temperature directly from the thermal diode included in .25 micron Pentium II/Celeron CPU's. In the past, most shareware/freeware monitoring programs either don't support the Genesys chips or don't support all of its features but recently the trend has changed. There are a variety of shareware/freeware hardware monitoring utilities are available on the web if you don't like AOpen's bundled software, such as Motherboard Monitor and Hardware Monitor, that should support the chip.

It was a little disappointing to not find AOpen's usually excellent manual in the box as has been the case in recent AOpen boards. Here they did cut corners a bit to save some money and have included a Quick Installation Guide, which might be the up-and-coming trend. The manual is included, but only on CD - not much good if you can't get the computer up and running. The Quick Installation Guide is also surprisingly brief with little information about the physical installation of the board. There is just some information on basic jumper settings and CPU setup.

USB Compatibility

• Number of Front Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 0

• Number of Rear Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 2

• USB IRQ Enable/Disable in BIOS: Yes

• USB Keyboard Support in BIOS: Yes

Recommended SDRAM

Recommended SDRAM: 1 x 64MB Mushkin SEC Original PC100 SDRAM; 1 x 64MB Memory-Man SEC Original PC100 SDRAM

SDRAM Tested: 1 x 128MB Mushkin SEC Original PC100 SDRAM; 1 x 128MB Memory-Man SEC Original PC100 SDRAM

Manufacturer: The Memory Man
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.memory-man.com

Manufacturer: Mushkin
Purchase Website: http://www.mushkin.com