As good as its 24K Gold heatsink
Written: Nov 23 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Speed, Stability, Features(all kinds of power savings, boot up, etc), Gold Heatsink
Cons: Pricey, Not so great warranty
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| TekDemon's Full Review: AOpen AX6BC Pro Gold |
Back in September 1999, I was looking to build a new PC for myself. My old Pentium 166Mhz simply wasn't enough anymore, and for my new PC I wanted something high performance, that could allow upgrades easily, and could still give me plenty of stability. I had heard of the headaches some motherboards can cause, and finally I found this motherboard.
The first thing that would strike someone about this motherboard is it's gold plated heatsink. This is in fact a heatsink plated with 24K gold. Although it may seem frivolous, it gives the motherboard it's name, and I believe it helps it keep stabler also, as the gold helps transfer heat.
Since I wanted the ability to expand, I was happy to see that it had 5 PCI slots, and 2 ISA Slots(one PCI and ISA slot is shared, so you can only choose one of them, not both) along with an AGP slot. The good thing about this was that I had just one ISA device at the time, my modem.
The 5 PCI slots provided ample room for me to fit in at first, my old pci video card(the agp card had not arrived yet), a raid controller, a voodoo 2, and a sound blaster live. This was quite pleasant as I no longer had to deal with a lack of slots.
Performance was wonderful! When I benchmarked my PC after I was done building it, the CPU/Motherboard benchmark had it outdoing the Dell's and Gateway's with the same CPU. This seems to indicate that this motherboard has phenomenal performance, as the Dell was a very fast machine at the time.
But stability was important to me. What good is a PC if it's fast but doesn't work half the time? Stability was excellent on this board. This is partially due to it's large capacitators. They are rated for 2200 uf rather than what most motherboards used at the time: 1000 uf and 1500 uf capacitators. These are seen right around the CPU area too. What this does is allow the motherboard to supply a steady current of electricity, in case a part of the system suddenly has a demand for more power. I believe this works wonderfully as I don't believe I've ever had a crash related to power needs on the motherboard! I've seen my monitor flicker from small power spikes, but my motherboard has ALWAYS remained working. This is an added benefit as I do not have an uninterruptable power supply(UPS).
Another reason I chose to buy this motherboard was it's ability to overclock CPUs. It supports Pentium II's, Pentium III's(both coppermine and katmai), Celerons of all kinds. It pretty much supports any CPU intel made during or after 1998 that is in slot 1 format. It will allow an FSB of up to 153Mhz! This from a chipset that was built to run at 100Mhz is very impressive, but did it actually hold up reliably at that speed? Well, I did not find this out at first, as no CPU out at that time would have held stably at that speed without exotic cooling(read: liquid nitrogen) and I did not have the urge to go out and spend all my money just to find out. Luckily, as time passed, I ended up with a new CPU. My Pentium III 550E. And with my nice big heatsink strapped onto my CPU I finally decided to run the motherboard at 153Mhz. And guess what? It was rock solid stable. Unbelievable! This was without any extra cooling over the 440BX chipset(the chipset the Gold heatsink is on). If anything, I believe the gold plating did indeed help the motherboard achieve this amazing speed.
So in summary, if you like motherboards that are reliable, allow plenty of expansion, have great performance, allow almost endless tweaking and overclocking, support lots of CPUs, then you'll like this motherboard! This motherboard is actually quite hard to find though. AOpen had always meant it to be a select and high end line of motherboards, and even when I wanted to buy it it was very rare. Now it's far rarer since they stopped production. However, they continue to make motherboards based on it. The Aopen AX6BC Pro II is identical in design except it does not have 5 PCI slots and 2 ISA(one shared with PCI) and instead has just 6 PCI slots. This is an evolutionary change, although you might not like it if you have that old modem you still want to use. Still, it is the exact same motherboard, gold heatsink and everything.
The only negative is that the warranty on the motherboard, although good, doesn't cover shipping of the motherboard to them, and AOpen's system of support is mired in confusion. Since my original dealer refused to allow me to return the motherboard to be repaired(turns out it wasn't broken a problem with my CPU) saying they only supported it for 30 days, and also refused to be reasonable when I pointed out that it has nothing to do with them, they just have to pass it on to AOpen(the dealer was MWave.com by the way), I was forced to find an official AOpen dealer, where one of the workers was apparently a rude jerk, but it turns out the others there were far friendlier. Unfortunately, I had to pay shipping which took a nice $30 chunk out of my wallet. Still, they did indeed check it over and everything, and verify that everything worked. Since other motherboard companies don't really offer support that is much better, I can't really complain too much(with the exception of Intel and their motherboards which are of course backed nicely by Intel themselves).
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 175
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Epinions.com ID:
TekDemon
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Member: Shiru Ye
Location: New York, NY
Reviews written: 13
Trusted by: 2 members
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