Intel 845 DDR Motherboard Roundup - December 2001

AOpen AX4B Pro

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We hadn't heard from or seen much from AOpen recently, but their AX4B Pro couldn't come at a better time. AOpen is one of the few manufacturers that went beyond Intel's specifications and outfitted their 845 DDR board with three 184-pin DDR DIMM slots. The maximum memory capacity of 2GB is still present but this just makes it much more convenient since 1GB DDR sticks are very rare. The board works perfectly fine with all three DIMMs populated and there is no noticeable performance hit under real-world applications.

The rest of the board is pretty straightforward, all of the tweaking options are provided for by the Award BIOS setup implemented on the board. It is clear that out of all of the motherboards in this roundup, the vast majority of them use the same Award BIOS setup.

While the AX4B Pro offers adjustment of CPU core voltages you cannot provide more voltage to the memory or AGP slot to aid in overclocking. The only additional feature on the board is the AC'97 audio driven by the Analog Devices AD1885 codec. This is a 2-channel solution that is more than adequate for basic audio, music playback or even games where you don't have much of a desire for surround sound.

AOpen does include a full version of Norton AntiVirus 2002 with the AX4B Pro and our testing did not expose any problems with the board.