Black Beauty: AOpen AX6BC Pro II Millennium Edition

Black Magic

You have to admit that this motherboard is probably the best looking motherboard ever created. It sounds crazy to say that, since motherboards are not exactly considered an object of passion, but, hey, if sports cars can be pretty, why can't a motherboard? However, don't expect to be able picking up any kewl chicks with the AX6BX Pro II ME.

Even this 'Millennium'-motherboard leaves room for improvements. For example the floppy connector, which is located at the 'wrong side' of the processor slot. After system assembly, this might reduce the heat dissipation of the CPU because of the floppy cable running directly across the processor. All connectors were marked clearly and no components will stop you from installing full size add-on cards. Only the lower DIMM locks need to be closed in order to install the AGP card.

Default AOpen Pro series motherboards come with a golden heat sink on the north bridge chip. According to AOpen technicians, the gold layer really helps to increase the cooling effect. To be honest, I don't really believe that a gold or platinum layer on the heat sink will effectively reduce the chip's temperature in any significant way, but the platinum heat sink looks very cool in combination with the black PCB. Both make the board look particularly valuable, making it appear rather special indeed.

We didn't encounter any special millennium fireworks after turning the system on. The BIOS does not differ from other AOpen BIOSes. It gives you all standard options including the alteration of the most important SDRAM timings, the option to fully disable all components and of course several overclocking features. Those include several FSB speeds up to 153 MHz, multiplier selection (in case you should have a non-locked processor) and different Vcore settings. To make overclocking as easy as possible, the BIOS will show you the resulting clock speed of your changes before you need to reboot.

AOpen realized that this motherboard will be for freaks, so they spared us with any funky and unnecessary onboard features. However, I would have liked an onboard 'black magic' 1394 adapter.