AOpen MX3W i810 MicroATX

The Bad

AOpen's tragic design flaw seems to revolve around the placement of the floppy drive connectors on their motherboards, the MX3W is no exception as the connector is placed adjacent to the AMR slot. This forces you to stretch the FDD cable over the surface of the motherboard to reach its final resting destination on the connector, a mistake made once too many times by AOpen.

The journey away from providing high quality written documentation with motherboards is not necessarily a welcome one, and AOpen unfortunately did away with their excellent user's manual in favor of the quick installation guide. For more advanced users, this isn't a problem and helps cut down on the final cost of the motherboard as well as saves a few trees in the process. For the novice or beginner, the absence of detailed written documentation is definitely a downside. Unfortunately that seems to be how the story goes in this highly competitive market, companies have to make whatever decisions are necessary to keep profits high.

The lack of an option for hardware audio support may scare away some gamers/music enthusiasts as the on-board audio codec does eat up CPU time. This does help keep the price of the MX3W down to a very reasonable level, which should be under the $100 mark.

Hardware monitoring support on the MX3W is next to non-existent, although the motherboard does allow for the monitoring of the on-board fan connectors it does not support any temperature readings (other than CPU temperature) due to the absence of any external thermistor headers on the board. An unfortunate oversight by AOpen for those users that are "hardware monitoring happy."

Celeron 300A owners may be a bit disappointed with the message that the MX3W does not support any sort of manipulation of the core voltage of Socket-370 processors. It's not so much that such a feat can't be accomplished, as it has already been proven that it has (ABIT, Iwill and Microstar have all proved that to name a few), but it does take a little time and effort to implement. If anything, AOpen wants to keep stability their number one priority, meaning that implementing core voltage tweaks isn't high on the to-do list until more of their customers demand it.

USB Compatibility

• Number of Front Universal Serial Bus Root (USB2) Ports: 0

• Front USB Cable Provided (USB2)? No

• 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: Mushkin SEC -GH PC100 SDRAM; Memory Man SEC -GH PC100 SDRAM
SDRAM Tested: 1 x 64MB Mushkin PC100 SDRAM; 1 x 64MB Memory-Man PC100 SDRAM; 1 x 256MB Corsair PC100 SDRAM DIMM (for compatibility testing only)

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

Manufacturer: Mushkin
Purchase Web-Site: http://www.mushkin.com

The Test

In recent times, choosing a motherboard cannot be completely determined by a Winstone score. Now, many boards come within one Winstone point of each other and therefore the need to benchmark boards against each other falls. Therefore you shouldn't base your decision entirely on the benchmarks you see here, but also on the technical features and advantages of this particular board, seeing as that will probably make the greatest difference in your overall experience.

AnandTech Motherboard Testing Methodology