Packaged along with the mainboard, you'll find AOpen's
Driver/Utility CD, Norton Antivirus 2000, Cables (Standard and 80pin IDE, and
floppy), an extra USB interface header with 2 ports, and a well written 184
page manual. So far I think this tops the charts, at least page-wise, as the
largest manual for a board I have seen to date. Also included is a 1-page quick
reference sheet.
The Install guide sheet lays out for you most everything
you'll need to install the mainboard, a real timesaver and thoughtful touch.
Installation of the board in my test bed was totally uneventful, which is a good
thing. :)
The AOpen AX34 ProII is an incredibly nice board. With
support for up to 2Gigabytes of memory (1.5 Gigabytes in the case of PC133
memory), UDMA-100 support, and nice & stable overclocking features, it's clearly
an exceptional example of the breed. While more expensive than some of it's
breathren, it's certainly got some of the extra features that are worth a few
buck more for. And it looks "trick" too. About the only downsides here are the
lack of 4-way interleaving in the BIOS, and some critical FSB speed gaps above
124FSB. Apart from those points, Aopen has designed a winner here, a board "just
shy" of being perfect.
Pros:
4 DIMM support for up to 2 Gigabytes of memory
FSB and core voltage tweaks
UDMA-100 via the VIA 686B southbridge
Killer looks, and thoughtful attention to the details.
Cons:
Somewhat sparse FSB options between 124 & 150mhz
Rating:
9/10
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