AOpen AX4PE Max (845PE)

AOpen AX4PE Max: BIOS and Overclocking

As is very common among most modern-day motherboards, the AOpen AX4PE Max utilizes the Award BIOS.

The PC Health section of the AOpen AX4PE Max contains a fairly good amount of information. Here you'll find readings on CPU temperature, system temperature, CPU other fan header speeds, Vcore, and PSU readings (all rails). There's also an option for enabling CPU warning temperature if so desired.

The AX4PE Max contained some fairly common DRAM tweaking options in the Advanced Chipset Features section. You're able to adjust CAS Latency, Precharge to Active, Active to Precharge, and Active to CMD. Unfortunately there were no Command Rate, Bank Interleave, or DRAM timing mode options available, but that's becoming more common with 845PE boards nowadays.

In addition, we see some good FSB adjustments available in the BIOS. The FSB is adjustable all the way up to 248MHz, which is plenty for most overclockers. One of the biggest downsides to this motherboard is the lack of any available memory adjustment options. There are 1:1 and 4:5 ratios available, but they are locked at DDR266 and DDR333 no matter the FSB value. This is unfortunate, as we would have liked to have seen how well this board overclocked with memory running at 400MHz with one, two and three DIMMs installed.

The voltage tweaking options are only mediocre with this motherboard. The highest available VDIMM you can achieve is 2.65V in .05V increments. While not too bad, memory overclockers will probably not be too happy, even though overvolting memory doesn't yield too much better of a memory overclock to begin with. VAGP is also pretty weak, since it's only adjustable as high as 1.6V. This will disappoint a few video card overclockers for sure, but like VDIMM and memory, it's not all that necessary to raise VAGP to get a good video card overclock.

One of the better voltage tweaking options you're able to play with is Vcore, which is adjustable all the way up to 1.85V in .025V increments. In reality, default Vcore runs between 1.48-1.50V, so you'll "only" able to go as high as 1.84V or so. 1.84Vcore is much too high for conventional air cooling though, so this is not a setback at all.

So far, every 845PE-based motherboard we've tested has come with an independent AGP/PCI lock. As was expected, the AOpen AX4PE Max utilized an AGP/PCI lock at 66MHz/33MHz. Interestingly enough, AOpen lets you adjust the AGP and PCI buses independently of each other, while still maintaining the AGP/PCI lock feature. For example, at default values, our system would be running 133MHz FSB / 66MHz AGP / 33MHz PCI. If we decided to overclock the FSB, we would be able to run 161MHz FSB / 66MHz AGP / 33MHz PCI. What AOpen lets you do differently than any other board however is run at, for example, 161MHz FSB / 75MHz AGP / 33MHz PCI or 161MHz FSB / 66MHz AGP / 40MHz PCI. Of course, you don't usually want to run your AGP or PCI cards too far out of their default frequencies anyway, so this should be a moot point for most. Still, it's an interesting feature to have.

Not surprisingly, the AOpen AX4PE Max maintained a pretty average overclock in comparison to all the other 845PE boards we've tested here at AnandTech. The following table lists the components we used for overclocking the FSB using the AOpen AX4PE Max motherboard:

With this very conservative overclocking setup we were able to reach 161MHz FSB, or a 2.74GHz core clock speed. With a little extra voltage (bumped up to 1.55V), we were able to hit 164MHz FSB reliably.

As we've mentioned in the past, this type of overclock isn't unusual for an 845PE-based motherboard (or any board based on an 845 chipset for that matter). We've tested many SiS 648 motherboards here at AnandTech (including ones we haven't shown you yet), and the average overclock still seems to hover between only 143MHz-150MHz. Our 845PE motherboards have all hovered between 160MHz-166MHz using the exact same FSB Overclocking Testbed as the SiS boards (same exact processor, CPU Vcore, Cooling, and Power Supply). Our results speak for themselves; Intel chipset-based motherboards are the only way to go if you're an extreme overclocker.

Unfortunately, we were unable to conduct any type of memory overclocking with the AOpen AX4PE Max because of the limited ratio options available. But even though the AX4PE Max has very limited memory control options, this board was still able to put up some good DDR333 performance and stress test numbers, so read on.