Socket 7 Board Review July 1998

AOpen AX59Pro

ATX motherboard, VIA Apollo MVP3 chipset, 512 kB L2 cache, 2x ISA, 4x PCI, AGP slot, 2x SIMM , 3x DIMM. Voltages: 3.52, 3.45, 3.2, 2.9, 2.8, 2.5, 2.2, 2.1, 2.0, 1.0V.

As with the AX6L Pentium II motherboard, the FDD connector is placed behind the memory slots at the other side of the board and no one knows why. The Siemens 8 ns SDRAM memory ran fine at 100 MHz in this motherboard and all CPUs worked properly at their nominal settings, only the MII didn't want to work at 100 MHz front side bus speed.

Interesting for all upgraders may be the two SIMM sockets. This way you can still use your good old EDO of FPM memory. The cacheable area of 128 MB ensures the fitness for most applications as well. In case you should consider larger amounts of RAM think about the 1 MB cache version of the AX59Pro, it doubles the cacheable area to 256 MB.

Even with only 512 kB L2 cache this board is one of my favorites in this test since it ran very stable and reliably during the benchmarks and allowed it to use non-PC-100 SDRAM as well. Overclockers may be interested to hear that the 112 MHz bus speed was running, but not reliably (280 MHz: x2.5). Maybe it works better with 7 or 6 ns SDRAM.

Homepage: http://www.aopen.com.tw