AOpen AX6BC Pro II Millenium Edition Slot-1 ATX

The Bad

We've said it before and we'll reemphasize it here - AOpen's hardware monitoring capabilities have always been weak and nothing has changed with the AX6BC Pro II. Hardware monitoring is performed by the Genesis Logic GL518SM - a chip that AOpen uses on most of their boards, but is rarely seen from other manufacturers. Four voltage are reported by the utility - +3.3V, +5V, +12V, and Vcore. No temperature or voltage information is provided in the BIOS, that information is only available via software. A thermistor mounted under the CPU socket provides the CPU temperature. Unfortunately, this chip is not capable of reading the CPU temperature from the on die thermal diode included in all Deschutes / Katmai / Mendocino / Coppermine CPU cores. Fortunately, software support from the shareware community has improved, so you're no longer stuck with AOpen's relatively weak utility if you don't like it.

Once again, it was a little disappointing to not find AOpen's usually excellent manual not in the box. Here they did cut corners a bit to save some money and have included a Quick Installation Guide. The manual is included, but only on CD - not much good if you can't get the computer up and running. The Quick Installation Guide is also surprisingly brief with little information about the physical installation of the board. There is just some information on basic jumper settings and CPU setup.

The 6th PCI slot is only a slave slot, meaning no bus mastering devices can be used in it. Once again, this is more of a limitation of the i440BX chipset rather than anything AOpen did wrong. The same goes for the ineffectiveness of FSB settings in the 133 MHz and up range due to the lack of a 1/2 AGP ratio.

USB Compatibility

• Number of Front Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 0

• Number of Rear Universal Serial Bus Root Ports: 2

• USB IRQ Enable/Disable in BIOS: Yes

• USB Keyboard Support in BIOS: Yes

Recommended SDRAM

Recommended SDRAM: 1 x 64MB Mushkin SEC Original PC100 SDRAM; 1 x 64MB Memory-Man SEC Original PC100 SDRAM; 1 x 128MB Mushkin SEC Original PC133 SDRAM

SDRAM Tested: 1 x 128MB Mushkin SEC Original PC133 SDRAM

Manufacturer: The Memory Man
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.memory-man.com

Manufacturer: Mushkin
Purchase Website: http://www.mushkin.com