Overclocking the FC-PGA Coppermine: Part 2

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The AOpen MX64 is a MicroATX form factor Apollo Pro 133A board with a Slot-1 interface.  Out of the three boards mentioned here, the AOpen was by far the most stable and the difference was definitely noticeable.  The board is very limited in terms of expansion (3 PCI slots), but it should be a very low-cost 133A board that boasts incredible stability as its primary feature. 

The MX64’s BIOS does not feature any of the odd settings we noticed with the Trinity 400; unfortunately, this also means that it doesn’t allow us to adjust the state of the CPU IOQ Size setting which resulted in the performance of the MX64 being a good 5 – 10% slower than the Trinity 400.  Since the CPU IOQ Size setting was previously not present in the Trinity 400 BIOS setup, it shouldn’t take all that much for AOpen to include a similar feature in a future BIOS update. 

Of the three boards mentioned here, the MX64 was the only one to feature the Super South Bridge (686A) which boasts support for integrated hardware monitoring, AMR, and four USB ports, and, while AOpen didn’t take advantage of the AMR support, they did make use of the four USB ports which can be a pretty useful feature.  It may not be the fastest or the best for expansion, but the MX64 is definitely the most solid Apollo Pro 133A out of the three and we expect it to be one of the most solid out of the entire 133A crowd once the rest are released, as has been AOpen’s tradition as the second largest motherboard manufacturer world-wide.