Hello again my name is Rodney Reynolds and welcome to another video review. Today, I will be looking at the AOpen AX4B-533 tube motherboard.
What is included in this package are some cables. They have included an ATA 100 cable as well as an ATA 66 and floppy cable. Also included is a case bash, this here is for the audio, the tube audio. I’ll go through how all these connect up a little later on. Also they have included the full version of Norton antivirus 2002 software. Some manuals a guide and as well the motherboard.
This motherboard is based upon the Intel 845E chip set. Let me now just go through and highlight some of the key features about this particular motherboard. Right here is where the Pentium 4 socket.478 CPU gets installed. You can put up to 2 gigabytes if DDR memory on this board. And by the way, it does support PC 3200. I tried that memory and it does work in the board. Also right here are your IDE controllers. Your floppy controllers right there. You have three PCI slots. Once AGP slot, this AGP goes up to 4 times AGP maximum.
Also on this board, you need a Pentium 4 power supply that has two feeds. There's one power connection right here and there's one right here. Now there are three fan headers on this board. There is one right here. There's one right here. And there's one right here. Right here is where you will plug your PS2 keyboard or mouse into. Your power out port. Your two serial ports. The Real Tech 5.1 channel audio. You have an Intel LAN port. As well as two USB 2 ports.
One very distinctive thing about this board is the tube sound. And it’s supplied by the Real Tech alc650ac97 code C on board 5.1 channel vacuum tube audio. Now what this does is give you great, clean, crisp, clear sound like you’ve never heard before. And it’s done using this vacuum tube. And this tube gets installed in the board very, very easily. And I would recommend to use a tissue when you're doing this, not to get any oil from your hand on the vacuum tube itself. You can see here, it’s extremely easy to install.
Also included is this tube audio card. And this card gives you the ability to have a line in. you have a 6.3 millimeter headphones jack plug here as well. 2 RCA outs, one for the left channel and one for the right as well as an optic out. Now this goes connected to the board via this cable. This cable goes connected in to this card and then it goes plug into the board and then you would install this in your case.
I will be looking at some of the key features within these particular bios, first looking at the advanced bios features. Within here you can go and enable and disable your L1 or L2 cache on your CPU and you can also enable or disable different boot devices for second or third.
Now something a little different on these particular bios is a thing called easy restore. And what this feature does is basically take in image of your hard drive. It does all these automatically, you don’t need any extra software. It takes an image of the hard drive, it stores that image on your particular drive. As an example, an 80 gig drive will only take up around 100 megabytes of space on your hard drive.
Something else here, this particular area is a thing called Vivid Bios. And what this does is it gives you text as well as graphics on the same screen, the post screen, when you’re booting up your computer system. And you can actually change that image there as well. Within the Advanced chip set features, you can go in and change the memory timing and you can either do this manually or you can do a By SPD option.
Also in here you can go down and adjust the system bios cacheable, video bios cacheable as well as adjusting the AGP aperture size. This integrated peripherals part of this bios is responsible for controlling the primary IDE, the secondary IDE. As well as all the USB, on board audio, the onboard LAN. As well as the functions for the serial ports, the parallel ports, et cetera.
Within the PC health status, you can go in here and view all the different temperatures, the fan speeds and the voltages. You can also set a CPU warning temperature.
Lastly, I will be looking at the frequency voltage control in here, you can go in and adjust the different font size volt settings as well as the CPU voltage setting.
Now there is a feature in this bios called Wash on Timer. And what this timer does is sense if anything is wrong with the CPU, it has over clocked to high, it would just set it back to its default speed. Now this is bad for you, frankly, for over clocking. Because you can over clock, unfortunately I tried everything. I’ve tried adjusting the front side VOS up and the voltage all the way up. And by the way this voltage does go all the way up to 1.85, that’s pretty high for a Pentium 4 CPU quite frankly. A lot of bios only go to like 1.7. However it doesn’t matter in this particular bios. They might be releasing a new bios in the future where you can somehow disable this watch dog timer and enable you to over clock.
The SISoftware Sandra CPU result is 4,424. The CPU multimedia benchmark is 9,909. And the memory benchmark is 2,029. The PC mark 2002 results are the CPU score 5,538. The memory score is 4,774. And the hard drive score is 808.
The3DMark 2001 second edition result is 11,687. The settings that I will be using for the Comanche forward demo are a screen resolution of 1280x1024. The bit depth is 32. Texture compression is checked. I’ve disabled Vsync. And hardware shaders are checked. And the result is 39.57 frames per second.
For the Quake 3 Arena demo, these are the following graphics settings. A video mode of 1280x1024. A color depth of 32 bit. The geometric detail is at high. The texture detail is at max. The texture quality is 32 bit. And the texture filter is trilinear. And the result is 183.4 frames per second.
In the XSMark I will be using all the default settings except for a screen resolution of 1280x1024 at 32 bit. And the result is 5,728.
Using Unreal Tournament 2003 at a resolution of 1024x768, the benchmark results are, the flyby is 150 and the botmatch is 54. And at a resolution of 1280x960, the fly by is 113 and the botmatch is 53.
Well does the vacuum tube really give you better audio? Simple answer is absolutely if you have the proper gear to accept all that high quality audio. You’re not going to get really good audio, period, from plastic speakers. You really need to have that good audio equipment to really receive all that good sound. So keep that in mind if you buy the board, you have crappy speakers. No, it’s not going to work at all.
This board again has the onboard LAN port. The onboard audio. It also has the onboard USB 2 support something it doesn’t have however is the ATA 133. It only supports ATA 100. And also at this board it’s not the greatest with over clocking. But again, almost all of AOpen products are extremely high quality and that is something that really captivated me about this particular product. Very, very, high quality. Overall, this is a great product.
Again, my name is Rodney Reynolds and this has been another video review. Be sure to check back very soon. I will have a brand new one for you then. Also be sure to pop into my website at www.3Dgameman.com. And when you’re there, go ahead and register. If you haven’t already registered, registration is completely free. You can go in there after and leave your own suggestions and comments and found out about all the other products on my video review. Until the next time, take care.
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