AOPEN AX4R Plus is the third Granite Bay board we tested in our labs. AOPEN being one of the manufacturers that innovates and design, we find that the AX4R plus a very interesting product that will catch your attention. As the board is targeted at the workstation level users, some of the feature sets are there. It is surprising that AOPEN left out 1394 and RAID on this board. Perhaps they would prefer to use SCSI and USB 2.0 instead. Innovative technologies such as Jukebox and EzRestore are installed independent of OS. I find that EzRestore is an exceptionally useful feature.

The performance of this board is mixed, with good scores in certain categories like the 3Dmark2001se, Q3 and Comanche 4, it performs average among all chipsets tested in the category of CCWS, BWS and CodeCreatures. Well, performance can always be tuned and what matters most is stability.

Overclocking wise, this board has 1Mhz stepping and also an independent PCI/AGP setting if you wish to keep your FSB at 133(533) and just overclock your PCI and AGP bus. Voltage adjustments are also available for Vcore, VDIMM, VAGP.  We are able to o/c to 150Mhz fsb using a P4 1.8A SL63X at CAS 2, 2-2-5 to 2.7G.

Discuss

Pros 好处:

• Overclocking features

• DieHard BIOS

• EzRestore

• Silent Bios & Silent Tek

• 5.1 Channel audio

• 6 x USB 2.0 

• SATA

• 10/100 LAN

Cons 坏处:

• No 1394

• No RAID support

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.

Innovative Design