All the specs are nice of course, and indicative of AOpen's
desire to make you like this mainboard. Of course, you're here to see what we
think of it, how it performs, and just how "overclocking friendly" it is. There
are several key areas that can be the deciding factor as to whether a mainboard
can be determined "just average" or "great".
Stability. The ability of a mainboard to handle various combinations of hardware, software and drivers, and to do so under normal and stressful conditions.
Core Voltage adjustments. Again here, as above, they are not a necessity. They are a key determining factor for our readers however. If you weren't interested in such things, you would not be here reading this.
BIOS tweaks. Especially in the case of VIA 133a boards, this is a must to achieve performance equity with the venerable BX chipset boards, and to a lesser extent, the Intel i815 platform now finally seeing the light of day.
Within the AOpen AX34 Pro II BIOS is where you'll find
much of the above. BIOS memory tweaks, consist of the usual P2C Concurrency, CAS
2/3 timing, Memory clock=PCIx2/3/4, DRAM timings of 10ns, 8ns, Normal, Medium,
Fast, and Turbo. Sadly there doesn't appear to be a "4-way interleave" setting
available in the BIOS. Yes, I know some of you will again point me to a little
.com file you can add to the autoexec.bat to enable this feature. I do not
include it for several reasons. First, this is a mainboard evaluation, and I
want to stick to the mainboards features. Secondly, it's not 100% reliable, and
can induce instability that I'd want to avoid in evaluation.
Front Side Bus speeds other than stock, are available,
but not as many choices of speeds as I would have liked to see. 66, 75, 83, 100,
103, 105, 110, 112, 115, 120, 124, 133, 140, 150 are the options you have. Most
of the range is acceptable, but the huge gaps in the 124-150 range could be
problematic for those trying to push a P3 CPU beyond rated speeds.
Core voltage tweaks are here, and they are complete.
Voltage adjustments from 1.3 to 2.05v in .05v increments are about as good as it
gets here.
My goal, was to duplicate the results I achieved during
my Celeron2-600
overclocking article, in which I achieved a nice stable 1008 Mhz, on my
personal Asus CUSL2 i815 mainboard. I've thrown this Celeron2 at the last four
(including this one) Socket370 mainboards we've reviewed in house, and the AOpen
AX34-Pro II handled it effortlessly.
An interesting sidebar, that I'm sure will at least have
some passing interest amongst our readers. I was out of heatsinks! (arrgh)
Rather, I was out of Alpha or GlobalWin sinks that I usually rely on for extreme
overclocking. Time constraints being what they are here, I could've torn down
and used my own Alpha FC-PAL35, but I didn't. So, I ended up scrounging around
for what heatsinks I did have here. I had a Thermaltake Chrome Orb handy, but
it's just too tricky to mount on a Socket370 board, and a couple of the
capacitors around the socket were slightly in the way. Several other uninspiring
heatsinks lay around here, but I wasn't impressed at all with them. I ended up
settling on (now don't laugh) the OEM heatsink that came with the last retail
box Duron 700 processor I obtained. It's a Taisol CEK724 heatsink, pretty
average in appearance, with what appears at first glance to be a dinky little
fan. But pumping at 6800 RPM it puts out a respectable 18 CFM of air. Needless
to say at this point, the heatsink did its job. Compared to an OEM Celeron2
heatsink of unknown manufacture I have here, there was a 9C temperature
differential at idle, @ 1008mhz & 1.8v core. Just surprising what you find out,
when you take the trouble to look. ;)
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