AOpen AX4SG Max motherboard review

Test system
Intel Pentium 4 2.8C (800MHz FSB)
AOpen AX4SG Max motherboard (Springdale 865G chipset)
2x Corsair XMS3500C2 256MB RAM (running at Dual Channel DDR400 @ 2-6-3-3 @ 2.65V)
MSI GeForce 4 Ti4200 with 128MB RAM 3D Card
Maxtor 120GB SATA Hard Disk (6Y120M0)
Antec 550W TrueControl PSU
OS : Windows XP with SP1






Overclocking
For our overclocking test we used the standard stock cooler of the Pentium 4 2.8C and a standard voltage of 1.525V. We had to use a divider of 1.6 for our DDR Memory and AOpens Performance Boosting Engine was enabled.


And this is how far we could get : 3387MHz. This was done with an FSB of 241MHz (We entered 241MHz in the BIOS but the screenshot in Wcpuid gives a readout of 241.90MHz). This is 964MHz QDR. So with stock cooling and stock voltage we were able to do an OC of almost 21%! With an FSB of 242MHz we could still get into Windows but it wasn't stable anymore, at 245MHz we couldn't even boot up WinXP. The idle temperatures with a room temperature of 24°C are around 33°, load temperatures have not been higher than 49°C. Our memory was only running at DDR385 because of the 5/3 memory ratio we had to use. Overall I consider this as a very easy and good overclock, a 21% OC with stock cooling and standard voltage!

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Benchmarking
We compare the results at 2.80GHz with the results at 3.387GHZ overclocked. We would have loved to compare this board with another Springdale or Canterwood motherboard but because we did not have any of those available at the moment we could not do this. We hope that this comparison will still give you an idea of how this motherboard is able to score. Also, keep in mind that we are using a GeForce 4 Ti4200, this will affect the gaming benchmarks a lot, with a Radeon 9800 or a GeForce FX 5900 the gaming benchmarks would have been a lot higher.


Application Benchmarks

Sisoft Sandra Max3
SiSoftware Sandra is a popular synthetical performance benchmark. Here are the CPU and memory tests :


Overclocked to 3.387GHz this setup is a performance killer! Damn we really need something like DDR480-DDR500 so we don't have to decrease our DDR clock, I'm wondering what performance we would get if we could get memory which is able to run at those speeds..

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PCMark2002
PCMark2002 is another popular synthetical performance test here are the results :
Again some very good scores! Overclocked we gained a CPU performance increase of almost 22% and memory almost 15%!

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PiFast 4.2
PiFast is a program to calculate Pi. We calculated Pi up to 9999999 digits. These results are in seconds, so lower is better.
In this benchmark we see a performance increase of 12%

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Gaming Benchmarks

3DMark2001SE
3DMark is a very popular Game benchmark, there has been a lot of controversy about it lately, but for this task it will do well I think. The test was done in 1024*768 with 32bit colors.
The overclock gained us 791 3D mark points.

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3DMark2003 - CPU tests
From 3DMark2003 we only used the CPU tests, the other tests were almost exactly the same because they benchmark more on your 3D card and not your CPU. This test was also done in 1024*768 with 32bit colors

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Comanche 4 Benchmark - 1024*768 @ 32bit colors

Comanche 4 goes faster with 7FPS extra.

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UT 2003 - 640*480 Benchmark

In 640*480 we could see the biggest performance differences. Especially in Flyby with an increase of 29FPS, in Botmatch we could see an increase of 11FPS.

UT2003 - 1024*768 Benchmark

In 1024*768 the differences were smaller. In flyby only 2FPS and in Botmatch 8FPS.

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Quake 3 Benchmark
And to end, the good old Quake 3

This used to be a very heavy game three years ago, but nowadays were getting +300FPS in 1024*768 with maximum quality without a problem. in 640*480 we saw a performance increase of 44FPS, in 1024*768 we saw an increase of 28FPS.