Black Beauty: AOpen AX6BC Pro II Millennium Edition — THG.RU

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AOpen AX6BC Pro II Millennium Edition» —>

Black Beauty with lots of (horse) power

Could a motherboard ever become the object of a certain fascination? Of course there are legendary ones, e.g. the Asus P55T2P4, which introduced the era of bus speed overclocking some years ago, or the ABit LX6, which was pretty close to reach 100 MHz system speed for the first time.

Today it’s extremely difficult to develop products, which really differentiate from others. Lots of expansion slots are normal, overclocking features have become standard, and additional hardware often drives the price of the motherboard up, without really being required by the user.

It’s difficult to create a motherboard that makes the user feel that he’s got something special. AOpen uses a for motherboards rather unconventional way to ensure uniqueness of its AX6BC Pro II ME.

Features

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.

Testing the Millennium Board

The AX6BC Pro II ME is based on the BX-chipset, which means that it directly targets the overclocking crowd that likes to go for a unique motherboard. If I was going to purchase this board, I would expect millennium-like stability and functions. Or in other words: I expect a product that is a mirror of all advances in motherboard technology until today. Thus I played around with the board to find out what’s behind the millennium hype. In addition to our standard benchmark runs I also tried the 153 MHz FSB speed setting and some hardware mixes.

Benchmarks: SYSmark 2000 — Windows 98 SE

The Millennium motherboard scores 166 points in SYSmark 2000 using Windows 98, which is a respectable result.

Benchmarks: SYSmark 2000 — Windows NT 4.0 Workstation

Under Windows NT, the black AOpen motherboard scores better than its competitors. Of course the difference is quite small, but it is good to see that there is still room for improvement — even though the chipset design is more than two years old.

Benchmarks: Expendable Timedemo

Also in Expendable, the AX6BC Pro II is able to get a top performance ranking.

Benchmarks: Quake III Arena

Again a new record! Using the same configuration as for the last BX motherboard review, the Millennium Edition of the AOpen motherboard scores more than 140 frames/s.

Hardware Tests

I also tried the 153 MHz FSB setting, using an unlocked Pentium III processor. As expected, there was no real success running the main memory in CL2 mode: The system crashed from time to time. After changing the settings to CL3, everything became more reliable. However, I faced several lock ups which I could not definitely reproduce. After switching down to 148 MHz FSB, the lock-ups disappeared completely.

In the next test I mixed three different SDRAM modules. One Crucial/Micron DIMM, one from Memory Solution (Germany) and a third from Viking Components. All three comply to the PC133 standard, but only the Crucial memory is capable of running at a CAS latency time of two cycles. To get the system running stable with all three DIMMs, I had to reduce the RAS-to-CAS delay to 3 clocks as well. After that, the system ran flawlessly.

Finally, I equipped the test system with some additional hardware to stress it a little bit: One older Adaptec 2940UW, a 3COM 905TX PCI network card, a Creative Sound Blaster 128 PCI, a Hauppauge WinTV/Radio card and an AVM ISDN Fritz! Card. Each requires an interrupt, which can give the motherboard BIOS quite a hard time.

Luckily, everything worked at once. That’s something that I really appreciate, since setting up a computer can easily become a pretty hairy affair if you have to find IRQ configuration mistakes caused by the BIOS. The worst scenario is a fully equipped motherboard that shares interrupts between several PCI devices without giving you the option to influence it. Having only one card that requires an unshared IRQ (e.g older Promise IDE controllers) will ensure that your whole system will hardly ever work properly.

Conclusion

I could start to summarize the features and test results, but this board deserves something different. There is not much sense in talking about the amount of PCI slots and DIMM sockets or the placement of different components on the PCB.

Originally, I thought that the cool black PCB was all that is to the AX6BX Pro II ME. Fortunately there’s quite a lot more to it. AOpen’s ‘Millennium Edition BX’ is one of the fastest BX motherboards ever. Particularly in the SYSmark runs under Windows NT and Quake III Arena it scored the highest results.

I really like AOpen’s idea of creating a special kind of hardware, since if gives the product a different feel. One of the factors is AOpen’s idea to make the AX6BC Pro II ME a limited edition. The product becomes more valuable without having any feature changed.

Besides little issues like the placement of the FDD connector, I found nothing to complain. And up to 148 MHz the board runs rock-stable and fast. All things considered, AOpen did a good job with their Millennium Edition and I really hope that they will continue releasing high-end limited edition products every once a while.

AOpen does not only supply motherboards and graphics cards, but also multimedia components, optical drives and cases. I’d suggest AOpen’s next Millennium Edition product to be a case made of glass. That would enable the owner to still see his pretty special edition motherboard once it’s up and running.