This motherboard uses Intel’s I845G, the G in the name signifies that the motherboard has onboard graphics. This motherboard supports PC2700, PC2100, PC1600 DDR SDRAM. There are a lot of cool features on this motherboard including onboard sound, onboard video, USB 2.0, Dual BIOS, Vcore adjustments.
You get USB 2.0 with this motherboard which is very nice, however you don’t get ATA133 which is a negative aspect because most motherboards now do support this. The motherboard comes with onboard video which I mentioned before which is possible because of the Intel 845G chipset. There is also onboard sound which uses the Realtek AC’97 CODEC, the motherboard also has onboard LAN which is also powered by Realtek.
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The motherboard comes with basically the same thing as all other AOpen motherboards. You get a I/O back plate for all the ports because it’s not the “standard” layout, 2 IDE cables and a floppy cable which are not pictured. You get two CDs, one which has drivers and things of that nature and the other has Norton Antivirus 2002 which is the best Antivirus software on the market in my opinion.
You also get the motherboard manual and an easy installation guide, I really like AOpen’s easy installation guide because it makes it a lot easier to find the normal things that you would be looking for during installation rather than having to scour through a whole manual to find one thing.
The box of the AOpen AX4G Pro is very similar to all of the other AOpen boxes having the window on the top so that you can see inside. The bottom of the box is also similar to the rest letting you know what your getting and all of the cool features that the motherboard offers you.
AOpen continues to use their “Black Beauty” PCB which I really like because green and brown PCBs are too generic and boring. Just taking a look at the top of the motherboard it looks to be laid out pretty well, we will look more into that as we progress. The bottom of the motherboard is quite cool too and has the backing of the heatsink clip.
Like I said the I/O panel is not your “standard” layout as far as motherboards go. Because this motherboard has onboard video one of the serial ports is the VGA port which isn’t a big deal because only legacy hardware uses serial ports and if you need more than one it’s probably time to upgrade anyways. It also has onboard sound and an onboard NIC which are down towards the bottom of the motherboard. I really like that this board has a lot of things onboard even if you don’t use them its nice to have them there as an option.
The jumpers on the motherboard are in a good place all in the bottom right corner where they usually are. There are the standard jumpers for all of the case LEDs, speaker, power, and reset switch. Down with all the jumpers is a fan header for the intake fan of your case and a WOL connection for your NIC.
There is also a set of jumpers for the Dr. LED which is an optional upgrade, jumpers for the IrDA and also some jumpers for a COM2 which if you need another serial port can be added. You can see right next to the COM2 jumpers there are traces for a memory stick and smart card but are not a feature of this motherboard.
In this picture there two sets of blue jumpers for the second and third set of USB ports. You can also see the dual BIOS setup on this motherboard which is again another option upgrade which should have been included because its a really good thing to have but if it doesn’t come stock it doesn’t help much.
On the other side we see the onboard PC speaker which I always like because then you don’t need to have another one inside of your case taking up room however little room that might be. There is also he CMOS battery which is somewhat odd because the battery is usually right next to the jumper that clears it. Right above both of those things are the CDROM cable connections if you are going to use the onboard audio. Right above that is the SPDIF jumpers which again is another option that should be included.
The heatsink on this northbridge is a passive one and is held on by 2 little wire clips. I am used to the passive cooling on AMD setups so to me this was a little strange but that’s probably just me. The AGP slot and another fan header are also in the picture along with a mosfet which has a little heatsink on it because they can get hot. I went ahead and took off this little heatsink to find the 845G chipset which basically looks like a socket 370 Pentium III that is soldered to the motherboard.
The motherboard has 3 DDR slots which can hold up to 2GB of PC1600 – PC2700 memory. I don’t like where the DDR slots are placed in relation to the AGP slot because you will not be able to add or remove memory when you have an AGP card installed which can be a real pain because when trying to add memory or troubleshoot you don’t want to have to take the video card out. You can see the ATX power supply is right next to the DDR slots and the IDE connectors are in a good location right in the middle of the motherboard right under the DDR slots, a.
The socket of the motherboard is right at the top of the motherboard and has the standard Pentium 4 heatsink clip layout. The socket of this Pentium 4 is really small compared to AMD’s socket A, something that I do like is the arm on the socket that opens it up is longer than the socket so it is easy to get a hold of which is usually a little harder on AMD motherboards. There is also another fan header that is right next to the socket for the heatsinks fan.
The AOpen AX4G Pro motherboard has a really cool feature which is the AOpen Jukebox Player. This AOpen Jukebox Player is basically a CD player that operates from the BIOS rather than from an operating system. Not only can you play the CDs from this utility but you can also download skins to change the look of the CD player. This is a pretty cool feature because it’s in the BIOS and is something new however I don’t see the real use for it unless you don’t want to boot into your operating system for some reason.
This motherboard uses a Phoenix BIOS like most of the motherboards on the market use today. The advanced BIOS features menu has all of the boot sequence options and the option to turn the Open Jukebox Player on and off as well as the AOpen logo on the boot screen. The Advanced Chipset Features menu is where you will find all of your memory tweaking options. There are some good memory tweaking options in the BIOS, and I was really surprised to see that there was a CAS 1.5 option, this is the first time I have seen this on a motherboard. You can also choose here to enable or disable your onboard video and configure it a little.
The PC Health Status part of the BIOS contains all of your temperatures, fan RPMs, and voltages. You are able to set a warning temperature in this menu but overheating is not that much of a worry with Intel setups compared with AMD setups. The power management setup has all of your options for power saving, and all of your wake up options for your components.
Finally the integrated peripherals section of the BIOS is just that, it has all of the options for all of your onboard things such as IDE, USB, video, audio, and other optional add on things like the Dr. Voice and LED. The Dr. Voice option is actually pretty nice, it is basically like a LED diagnostic system but that uses the PC speaker to tell you what is wrong by talking to you, the only downfall to this is that it is pretty hard to understand due to the fact that its a PC speaker.
Because this is the only Intel motherboard I have I am not able to put it up against any others, I do however have a comparable AMD setup which I will be using as comparison which is even better in my opinion because we can see who really has more power.
Intel Test Bed
- AOpen AX4G Pro
- 1.6aGhz Pentium 4
- 256MB GEIL 3500 DDR (review to come)
- XFX Geforce 3 Ti500
- 30GB Western Digital hard drive
- Koolcases “Prince” case
AMD Test Bed
- EPoX 8K3A+
- Cooler Master ATC-101 (review to come)
- Athlon XP 1800+ @ 1900+ (1.6Ghz)
- 256MB GEIL 3500 DDR (review to come)
- 80GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD
- XFX Geforce 3 Ti500
- Sound Blaster Live! Value
- Pioneer 16x slot load DVD
- 10/100 NIC
- Floppy
All testing will be done at 32 bit color, vsync is off, AA is off, and all of the memory options are at the most aggressive settings. All of the game testing will have the lowest graphics levels on to test the CPU instead of the video card and all testing will be done at 640×480, Below is a screenshot of the WCPUID for the Intel setup, as you can see.
The first benchmark I ran was PCMark2002 which tests the CPU, memory, and hard drive of a system with many different tests. I ran the benchmark on both the AMD setup and the Intel setup and at the end the results ended up being pretty close.
The AMD system beat out the Intel one in the hard drive benchmark probably because the AMD setup had an ATA133 drive while the Intel one had an ATA100 drive.
The Intel setup beat the AMD setup in the memory benchmark by 75 points, not much but it beat it none the less. Finally with the CPU benchmarking the AMD again beat the Intel setup by a little over 900 points.
I ran SiSoft Sandra Pro 2002.6.8.97 and ran the memory bandwidth benchmarking on both the AMD and the Intel setup again. The AMD setup edged out the Intel setup by a little over 200 points on both the float buffered and the int buffered. As you can see the quad pumped memory and 400 FSB on the Intel setup doesn’t make it faster.
I ran 3DMark2001SE which is a synthetic video benchmark on both machines and again the AMD setup beat out the Intel setup by 1401 points. I was not very surprised to see that the AMD system beat the Intel one because so far that’s been the norm and AMD systems are more geared toward gamers.
I then ran Vulpine GLMark which is another synthetic video benchmark, the AMD system again beat the Intel system by almost 10 FPS which will definitely make a difference while gaming.
The last benchmark that I ran was Quake 3 – Demo001 which is a very popular game and a very popular benchmarking tool to see how many FPS I could get, once again the AMD setup beat out the Intel setup by about 7 FPS.
Clearly the AMD setup performs better than the Intel one in all of the tests except the memory part of PCMark2002. Because the systems are not exactly the same there is a little margin for error however even with that margin the AMD system won. As for the Pentium 4 let’s see how well it can overclock on this motherboard, I have heard nothing but good stories about overclocking with a 1.6a chip.
This was my first experience overclocking with a Pentium 4, I had heard that these 1.6a chips were able to do really well and should be able to hit at least 2.5Ghz or so. I played around in the BIOS for a while with all of the memory settings and the Vcore which was the only voltage I was allowed to change.
After testing this motherboard for a while the highest overclock I was able to get out of it was 1.92Ghz (16×120). I probably would have been able to get a higher overclock if I would have been able to drop the multiplier which I could not because these CPUs are locked and I did not have the wire or the guts to unlock it.
I also needed to be able to give this RAM some more voltage because I feel that that was really holding it back. AOpen motherboards are not known for being the best overclockers but they do bring some other things to the table which other companies do not. All of the overclocking benchmarks were run the same was as the stock ones, below is a shot of WCPUID showing the overclocked speeds.
I ram PCMark2002 again while overclocked and saw a good improvement in all of the differant areas of the benchmark. I was able to overclock this CPU more than I was the results would have been much more impressive.
I ran SiSoft Sandra Pro 2002 again and ran the memory bandwidth benchmarking there was a really good increase in scores by only upping the FSB by 20 which means that if I could have gotten this motherboard to let me do more it would have done even better.
I ran 3DMark2001SE again and got 1304 more points while being overclocked than I did at stock. Because this is more of a video card benchmark than a CPU benchmark the increase isnt much to talk about then again if you are trying to beat someone in 3DMark2001SE scores this 1304 point increase could do it for ya.
After the overclock Vulpine GLMark saw only a 3.4FPS increase while overclocked which isn’t really much to talk about.
The last benchmark again was Quake 3 – Demo001 here we see a really good increase in FPS a big 34.7 more which is really good and let’s you know that the overclock is doing the job that it’s supposed to do.
This motherboard is a great motherboard for someone looking to build an entry level computer because of the USB 2.0, onboard video, sound, and NIC. This motherboard has a good layout and is easy to setup and get running which would be good for someone who is new to building computers.
The board has some other good features that would be good for a novice like Dr. Voice, and the AOpen Jukebox CD Player which are good because if they have a problem with the motherboard they would hopefully be able to figure out what is wrong easier and fix the problem. The Jukebox is cool too because entry level users don’t always need to be in an Operating system they may just want to listen to a CD.
Overall I am going to give this motherboard a 7/10 because it bring a lot of good things to the table but it is lacking a lot of overclocking features which basically everyone is looking for these days. I would really like to thank AOpen for sending me over this motherboard to review.
Pros:
- Onboard video, sound, and NIC
- USB 2.0
- Black PCB and good layout
- Dr. Voice & onboard PC speaker
- Norton Antivirus 2002 included
Cons:
- Not a good overclocker
- Optional items are not included
- No ATA133