AOpen AX4SG Max I865G Motherboard

By jw

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.

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