Today, I have two Aopen motherboards on the test bed. The Aopen
AX34 Pro II and the Aopen AX3S Pro. Not only does comparing these two boards
give us an idea of what Aopen have to offer on the Socket 370 front, it is
also a very good opportunity to compare the performance of the two chipsets
being used.
The Aopen AX34 Pro is based on the Via Apollo ProA chipset and
sports the Via 686B south bridge for native ATA-100 support. The Aopen AX3S
Pro uses the Intel i815E chipset and also has native ATA-100 support. Apart
from the chipset, to the standard user there are very few differences between
the motherboards. But there are some differences, here
you can find exactly what..
The AX34 has 4 dimm slots while the AX3S has 3. For most this is not really
a problem as you are very unlikely to need all 4.
If you need say 256mb of ram, it is better to use one 256mb
stick than two 128mb sticks. By having two sticks it introduces latency delays
- causing less ram performance and less stability at overclocked memory speeds.
The AX34 has 6 PCI, 1 AMR slot while the AX3S has 5 PCI, 1 AMR. There are
some people out there with a lot of PCI cards in their machines and that extra
PCI slot maybe very useful. As far as the AMR/CNR slot goes, I wouldn't go
near one and would have much preferred to see an ISA slot for using older
card compatibility. The AMR and CNR slots are both cases of Intel trying to
force the market to what they think is right (much like Rambus), but you are
better off with a PCI modem/NIC/sound.
The AX3S has a 24k gold heatsink on the chipset - which in my
opinion is a bit of a gimmick. The AX34 uses an aluminium heatsink and both
do a good job of cooling them down - as far as having a gold heatsink, this
is wasted when they are only held on by frag tape. If they had used a pin
attatchment system with thermal paste such as the Abit motherboards, the effort
may be worth it. From initial inspection I would complain that there is no
active cooling on the chipsets (i.e a fan) but infact they have position the
socket orientation to one that will blow air from the CPU's heatsink onto
it.
One thing they both have is an onboard AC'97 sound codec. In
general anything onboard is slated specifically sound because it is reliant
on the CPU. But there are some good things about onboard sound
a) it's cheap
b) it frees up a would be a used PCI slot
c) if your buying workstations 75% of the time, sound
is not needed - so users get sound whether it's needed or not.
One thing the AX3S has which the the AX34 does not have(I hope
these names haven't confused you as much as they have confused me) is onboard
graphics. The i815E chipset incorporates the Intel i752 graphics giving actually
quite reasonable performance and once again as with most integrated solutions
at hardly any extra cost. Integrated graphics is BAD when there is no AGP
slot - but this motherboard also includes a 4x AGP slot as well. So this onboard
graphics can either act as a backup to your main AGP graphics card, or in
a workstation environment would be a very cheap and useable alternative to
a separate graphics card. The graphics shares system memory, I could not find
an option to choose exactly how much - it took only 1mb of system memory,
yet It was quite happily running in 1152x768 at 24bit colour! I did notice
there was NO 32bit colour option, although I was able to have a reasonable
game of Quake 3 once I found the optimal settings for this card.
An option Aopen are starting to include is the "Die Hard Bios"
this is basically two bios chips on board, so if one goes wrong, you boot
off the spare and reflash the other one. Now there is a technique when using
the older rectangle shaped bios chips where you could hot swap the chip into
another machine and reflash it. But now more and more motherboards are moving
away from the larger rectangle chips and using the smaller square sized chips
- this technique is pretty impossible with these square chips as you need
a special puller to take the chips out, and in the the case of the AX3S, it's
soldered directly onto the board. This is why I believe an option like the
"Die Hard Bios" is soon going to become necessary.
