AOpen AX4SG Max motherboard review

Conclusion
I'm really impressed with the AOpen AX4SG Max, its features are impressive and so is its performance. With 800MHZ FSB support, 4 SATA ports, 8x AGP, DDR400 Dual Channel Memory support, integrated LAN/Audio/VGA, 8 USB ports, 2 Firewire ports, Die Hard BIOS, Performance Boosting Engine (with BIOS v1.01), and a lot of goodies in the box this motherboard really features a lot!

The integrated VGA did not impress us, but it should be good for normal office usage. The integrated audio is very well, ok it isn't of such high quality as the Soundblaster Audigy 2, but still, I think it sounds very well for an integrated audio solution. The integrated LAN/ethernet solution is also very fast!

The performance of this motherboard is impressive, the standard results were very good, but when we started overclocking the performance became superb! (Ok maybe not in the game tests but blame that on the GeForce 4 Ti4200 ). And not to forget the Springdale chipset combined with a 800MHz FSB CPU overclock really well! I've seen people getting +3.3GHz from an Intel Pentium 4 2.4C with air cooling!

A Springdale like the AOpen AX4SG Max, or AX4SG-N (which is a cheaper but with some less features => no onboard LAN/Firewire, no Silicon Image SATA controller and less accessoires) combined with a 800MHZ FSB CPU like the Pentium 2.4GHz is really the performance/cost solution of the moment. The AOpen AX4SG Max is a little bit on the expensive side with its cost of $165, but if you don't need gigabit ethernet, firewire, 2 Silicon Image sata ports, RAID 0 and 1, and the full list of accessoires then I could suggest the AG4SG-N which costs $115.


Some Dislikes
- Passive cooling on the Northbridge, they probally did this because it would not fit in their 'Silentek' vision, but still I think a fan on the northbridge would be fine. Probally this could result in better overclocking results.



Where to buy
If you are from America then you can take a look at Newegg the AX4SG Max is $167 and the AX4SG-N $115. Or My AOpen which offers the AX4SG Max for $161 and the AX4SG-N for $107.
If you are from Europe then I would suggest to check out the Where to buy page, because I can't directly find a good webshop which carries both motherboards. Price should be around €161 without VAT.


The AOpen AX4SG Max motherboard receives a 9/10 from DV Hardware