Legit Motherboard Reviews

AOpen AX4SG Max I865G Motherboard

Manufacturer: AOpen
Product: AX4SG Max
Date: Wed, May 21, 2003 - 09:00 AM
Written By: Justin West -
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Introduction:

Introduction:

With the initial excitement of the Canterwood beginning to come to an end in the computer enthusiast market, companies are now releasing their secret weapon: the Intel 865 "Springdale." If you notice this chipset number, 865, and know that the "Canterwood" is the 875, you will realize that the "Canterwood" is engineered to be a superior chipset to the "Springdale". And like the 875 and 845, the 865 utilizes the new HyperThread processors from Intel. The question is how closely related are the "Springdale" and the "Canterwood?" Well, the answer is VERY! The "Springdale" chipsets were manufactured at the same time as the "Canterwood" chipsets. The difference is that the "Canterwood" chipsets were handpicked from that bunch of chipsets and a few more new technologies, such as PAT, were integrated into them. So by trying to explain all of this, my point is that the "Springdale" chipsets were engineered to be the same quality as the "Canterwood." Theoretically, the performance should not be much lower than the "Canterwood". You will be able to decide this for yourself once you visit our Performance pages in this review!

Today we will be taking a close look at AOpen's I865G "Springdale" motherboard that was just released to the public today: the AX4SG Max! The "G" in the I865G chipset stands for integrated Graphics. So this motherboard will have onboard video which we will mention again on our features page. Shown below is a chart of AOpen's 5 Intel 865 "Springdale" Chipset motherboards that have been released in North America. Two of the boards use the I865PE chipset, and the other three use the I865G chipset (one of which is a Micro-ATX motherboard). All of these motherboards come with AOpen's 3-year warranty.

AOpen is a company that we have been dealing with for a while now and have developed a very strong relationship with. AOpen is a very reliable company that you will not go wrong with. They only manufacture quality products that their customers will be happy with. You can learn more about AOpen by visiting their website.

Now we will start our tour of AOpen's AX4SG Max motherboard! We will begin with a close look at the package and features this board contains.

Package & Features:

AOpen's Package:

  • AX4SG Max User's Guide
  • AX4SG Easy Installation Guide
  • AOpen Bonus Pack CD
    1. Online Manual
    2. Motherboard Drivers
    3. Hardware Monitor Utility
    4. Adobe Acrobat Reader
    5. ProMagic 6.0
  • Norton AntiVirus 2003
  • EzRestore using ProMagic Easy Installation Guide
  • Product Registration Card
  • S/PDIF IN-OUT PCI plate
  • Game Port and USB PCI plate
  • Firewire PCI plate
  • COM Port PCI plate
  • Two SATA HDD cables
  • One 4pin-to-SATA HDD Power connector
  • I/O Interface Case Backplate
  • One 80-wire IDE cable
  • One 40-wire IDE cable
  • One Floppy Disk Drive cable
  • Intel Application Accelerator Driver Diskette
  • Silicon Image Serial ATA Driver Diskette

As you can see by AOpen's Motherboard package, they give you everything you need to fully use this motherboard as soon as you receive it!

AX4SG Max Motherboard Features:

  • SilentTek Noise Reduction Technology
  • EzRestore/ProMagic HDD Crash Protection
  • Dr. Voice II
  • DieHard BIOS
  • EzWinFlash BIOS
  • WinBIOS Technology
  • 1MHz Stepping CPU Overclocking
  • Vivid BIOS Technology
  • Ezclock
  • FSB800
  • Dual-Channel Memory
  • DDR400 Memory Support
  • VGA On-Board
  • Serial ATA
  • RAID Support
  • USB2.0
  • AGP8x
  • IEEE 1394 (Firewire)
  • Gigabit LAN
  • WinDMI
  • WatchDog ABS
  • Hyper-Threading Technology

AOpen has put everything possible on this motherboard! They have integrated all of the latest technologies like Gigabit LAN, Firewire, USB2.0, Hyper-threading... the list is above, I don't need to re-state it all. All I need to say is that it is a rather impressive list.

The one technology that I will touch on is the VGA On-Board. With the I865G chipset, you get onboard graphics. The onboard graphics you get is nothing special. Through the BIOS, you can choose how much memory will be used to support the onboard VGA graphics. The Max is 32MB and the Min is 4MB. As you can see, the onboard graphics you get is not at a performance level at all; the 8x AGP slot is there for that. The purpose for having onboard VGA for this board is if you were using it as a server or such where you had multiple servers connected to a single monitor. The onboard VGA would become very handy in that case.

Now that you know what this board has to offer, I will show you the layout of the AX4SG Max Motherboard.

Next Page - Layout:


Review Index
Page 1 - Introduction:
Page 2 - Layout:
Page 3 - BIOS:
Page 4 - Test System:
Page 5 - Memory Stability Results:
Page 6 - Conclusion: