Intel 845E Motherboard Roundup - August 2002

AOpen AX4B Pro-533

For the most part, the AX4B Pro-533 is yet another feature-filled 845E board.

Click to Enlarge

This board comes with the usual features we've seen in most other 845-based boards.

The AX4B integrates LAN and sound chips from Realtek, and as each day passes we can see a trend with motherboard and chipset makers; sound and LAN are beginning to become a basic part of a motherboard's layout. We are pleased with this kind of integration, it's about time these featuers became a standard for motherboards everywhere.

AOpen also decided to go with onboard RAID in the form of Promise's PDC20275 controller. We don't think it's totally out of the realm of possibility to see RAID start becoming a standard on motherboards as well as LAN and sound.

To round out the AX4B Pro-533's feature package, there's support for up to 6 USB 2.0 ports through the ICH4 South Bridge and a total of 6 PCI slots and 3 DIMM slots.

In terms of layout, the AX4B Pro-533 isn't anything too special. As with most of the other 845E boards, we would have like to have seen the 20-pin ATX header nearer to the top of the 3 DIMM slots instead of all the way over near the I/O panel. One feature we did like to see was plastic plate support under the Pentium 4 socket. This is a good precaution for consumers that use heatsinks that don't fully comply with Intel's design guidelines. Depending on how much pressure these heatsinks apply to the socket, it's possible to badly bend your board.

You can also see a rather large, passive heatsink over the MCH (North Bridge).

Stressing the AX4B Pro-533

The AX4B Pro-533 was very solid during our stress testing. This 845E-powered board was able to whip through 24-hour Prime95 torture tests without a single problem. All memory settings were set to their most aggressive. In addition, populating all 3 DIMM slots didn't seem to affect the AX4B Pro-533 at all. We were able to run all our usual programs and benchmark suites without issue.

Currently, the AOpen AX4B Pro-533 is selling for approximately $120.