REVIEW ZONE - AOpen AX6BC BX Motherboard Review ( Page 1/8 )

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REVIEW ZONE : everything you need to know

AOpen AX6BC 440BX Mainboard

Manufactured by AOpen
Retail Price $130

Reviewed by Chamila Sumanasekera
Decemberber 24th, 1998

Introduction

Unless you're really new to BX motherboards, you certainly must have heard of AOpen. This company builds many PC components: from bare systems to add-on peripherals. With the introduction of the Intel BX motherboard chipset, AOpen was one of the very first manufacturers to put out a product based on this chipset. By now, AOpen has shown the world what they can offer with the AX6B motherboard. This excellent product was one of the best BX motherboards, competing head to head with names like Abit BH6, ASUS P2B and Microstar MSI 6119.

AOpen has now designed and built yet another motherboard to add to their BX family- the AOpen AX6BC, built using the 5 PCI / 2 ISA / 1 AGP combination. This combination is very important for today's users since almost all new peripherals are based on the PCI bus. This means PCI sound cards, PCI modems, PCI DVD decoders, PCI network adapters, PCI Voodoo2 boards and even PCI TV tuners. Now that's a lot of PCI for a user to choose from. Which means 4 PCI slots aren't going to be much help in the future. And if that wasn't enough, the Microsoft PC 98 specifications call for the system bus to contain PCI bus expansion slots only and no ISA expansion slots.

There are, however, only 3 DIMM slots, compared to the usual 4. This shouldn't be much of a problem unless you plan to use more than 768Mb of RAM on your system or if you still have a couple of 32 MB DIMM modules hanging around the place. The jumperless design of the AOpen AX6BC main board makes CPU Installation and overclocking simple.