AOpen AX3S Plus
Board Revision: N/A
BIOS Version: N/A
As opposed to AOpen's AX3S Pro motherboard, which we reviewed back in September 2000, the AX3S Plus is a completely new development, since it is a total redesign. In addition to the black PCB and the aluminum heat sink, it has other important advantages, namely the Promise PDC20265R IDE RAID controller and a sixth PCI slot. A fourth DIMM socket is also available. Again, since the 815 chipset only supports 512 MB SDRAM, two 256 MB DIMMs are enough to reach this limit.
Thanks to the Promise chip, you can attach four additional IDE devices, while hard drives can be used in RAID 1 or RAID 0 configuration. The on-board IDE controller is part of Intel's 82801BA and supports four ATA/100 devices.
Though the Plus board does not come in a fancy box with a window (as does the ASXP-1394), it is equally well equipped with hardware: Die Hard BIOS, 4 DIMM sockets, 6 PCI, CNR, AGP 4x, UltraATA/100, AC97 sound, Dr. LED and Dr. Voice (additional hardware required, see Crème De La Crème: Special Edition 815 Boards and Useful Add-Ons for more information), on-board piezo speaker and an excellent BIOS.
In terms of performance, the differences with the AX3S Pro are negligible.
Homepage: http://www.aopen.com
