Heir To The BX: 18 Pentium III Motherboards Using The 815 Chipset

AOpen AX3S Pro, Continued

AOpen is selling their high end motherboards in this new package for some weeks now. The package allows every interested person to take a first look at the motherboard. Particularly the golden heat sink is of course visible as well. Inside this nice box, there is a driver CD and another disc with Norton Ghost and Norton Anti Virus. The manual is comprehensive, complete and very easy to understand. Right now, AOpen is concentrating on multi-language versions of their products. We already got a German version of this motherboard as well, which makes a very professional impression. Attempts of most manufacturers to translate manuals into other languages didn't be very professional so far, although Abit made a pretty good job of that.

Two jumper sets define the basic bus speed range (66/100/133 MHz), everything else is done in the BIOS. Here you can select FSB speeds up to 166 MHz. Unfortunately, the memory is only operated at 140 MHz when choosing the 166 MHz setting. According to AOpen technicians, this limitation is founded in the clock generator. At 166 MHz FSB and 140 MHz memory clock (asynchronous), the system is basically not faster than at 150/150 MHz.

Overclockers are giving the option to alter the CPU core voltage between 1.3V and 3.5V.