AOpen's 915P-Motherboard i915Pa-PLF includes a new set of power management functions the company calls Powermaster. Its job is to manage clock rates while the system is operating, in the interests of saving energy and keeping things cool. As a consequence work speed can vary (work speed is calculated by dividing the clock speed by bus rate, so that a 3.4 GHz CPU with a 200 MHz FSB clock has a work multiplier of 17, which serves as a kind of basic performance metric). In our testing, the motherboard reduced speeds by as much as 42% so that a system running under minimal load, might use a bus speed of only 140 MHz and CPU clock speed of 2.4 GHz, while maintaining the same work multiplier of about 17.

The principles behind Powermaster are nothing new, and many vendors use similar functions when overclocking systems under heavy processing loads. MSI offers this capability for its motherboards that include the Corecell-Chip; Abit offers a microGuru capability and other vendors offer similar features. But extending this idea to under-clocking as well as over-clocking is something that AOpen has pioneered

The board only accommodates DDR400 memory -with four available slots - and not DDR2 modules. That said, a Realtek-Chip makes Gigabit Ethernet available via PCI Express. The Southbridge ICH6 provides 4 Serial ATA ports, with an Ultra-ATA channel for optical drives. You'll also find a 7.1 Sound system included, as well as a Firewire chip (with matching connections), along with three 32 bit PCI slots for other adapters as needed.