Comparison Discussion

Well I whipped out a second P4 board I had laying around here, (an Asus P4B533 - 845E chipset) and compared it a bit to the Asus board. Now I normally try to keep the "cost" of items out of my decision because prices fluctuate and the only real qualifier for products is how they perform or features. But I am going to include price into this as I think it is a significant factor for these boards:

A word about the prices. I quoted Newegg simply because they were the only mainstream place that carried both boards. Now normally I tend to stay away from recommending Newegg as I personally feel they do not help the industry at all. There are many other companies out there that I would much rather give my money to personally than Newegg... that's just my lil rant for today :)

OC'n

Well this was where I found that both these boards were fine and it was the CPU that was bunk. The P4 2.0Ghz I have for this setup would MAX stable operation at 120Mhz (2.4ghz) with it being stable SOME TIMES at 125Mhz. (2.5Ghz)  Both boards have an array of OC features, but I did think that the AOpen board had more features to offer than the Asus.  The Asus's BIOS setup was clumsy and lacked the detail for setting the AGP/PCI clock that the AOpen offered.  The AOpen also supports the DDR 333 spec which is inherent in its GE Chipset which was released quite a bit after the original E chipset was released.  As I mentioned earlier in the review I did get a chance to use a 2.0Ghz C1 stepping P4 and was quite impressed with the OC I got at stock voltage and stock fan on the AOpen. Ran stable at 138Mhz ( 2.76Ghz).  I only had a few minutes to test it out, I am sure it could have gone faster.

For future testing I am going to be purchasing a chip that can OC more than a few Mhz hehehe So embarrassing when your CPU cant get it up for a review...

Features

Now this was an almost cruel match up. The AOpen has a ton of bells and whistles while the Asus is a more base model. The C-Media audio that the Asus sports is regularly called better than the Realtek that the AOpen has.   I listened to both on some fairly nice Sennheiser headphones, and noticed no real difference in quality. Since the AOpen allows that DD5.1 out of the analog ports I would have to say that it does walk away from the Asus in the audio department also.

The Asus is more attractive for those who don't want a billion IRQ's being used to host like 20 onboard devices, and wants to do most of it with add-on cards. I mean most people DO have video cards, DO have sound cards, and probably have some sort of Promise ATA RAID (or an SATA add-on) card if they wanted ATA speeds over a standard ATA 100.  So I don't think the additional features on the AOpen make it instantly a better board, I just think its targeted to a different group.

Overall Comparison

Well I think this is where the "cost" should come into play. When you compare what you get with the older, yet still damn peppy Asus P4B533 for 102$ to the AOpens 121$, I think its hard to not see a value in the AOpen. For that extra 20$ you get Serial ATA, ATA133, Onboard Video, FireWire, Optical/Digital Audio out, etc...  Also from what I saw both boards performed very similar in OC speeds and features in that respect.

Conclusion / Thoughts:

It's been almost 1.5 years since I wrote a motherboard review. Since then my goals in the info that's conveyed has changed somewhat. I have more or less come to the conclusion that benchmarking in 15 apps on one board is sort of foolish, I think everyone knows what a certain chipset or certain CPU will perform well before reading this review. Different mobo makes have resulted in like 1% at the most differences in speeds ( and that is well within the error threshold) So in this review instead I thought I would go over the features and the areas of the board that you would actually USE it. (unless all you do is use benchmarks all day long :p hehehe)

Overall I love this board.   For its price, I don't think you can beat it. AOpen ( as I am hearing) has a bumm rap with people for issues on some of their AMD products in the past.  I have only used Intel AOpen products and I have NEVER been disappointed. (this is my 5th AOpen motherboard) From my testing of this board well over a month ago (the time I did the testing and playing with the board till now), I have recommended this board to friends and co-workers.  A total of 4 people have bought these boards from my comments and I believe every one of them are very pleased with the results.  Now there are better boards out there, boards with more features, and better quality chipsets ( Audio/Lan/ etc...).  But there aren't many at ~120$.

The Hardware Monitor portion and PWM control of the fans on the board also impressed me. I went into this expecting another half assed attempt of a management app, but was surprised to see something that worked. Kudo's to AOpen on that!

Overall I would say this Board is good across most all groups, Its simple to understand manual makes it an OK choice for a n00b, the features make it a good choice for someone who wants to build a cheap additional workstation or server for that matter, and I think it packs enough OC goodness to keep most OC'rs happy. Some extreme OC guys may not find the board as OC'able as some of the others out there, and its a bit expensive for people who are looking for disposable boards to just solder on and if they break it .. oh well...  I don't consider AOpen to be a strong Server component MFG (that's Tyan for me), but for workstation goodies I think they are right on the money.

For me I am very happy to have this board and its going back in to keep doing MPEG2 Compression and run as a DVD burner box (2 Sony 500A DVD-R's in it, and a Matrox RT2K NLE board).  It also makes for a nice LAN box.    I want to give Prop's to KDComputers for the Asus P4B533 ( I bought it from them a few months ago), and to AOpen for the 5th great board I have owned from them.

If you have any comments or Questions please contact Joe@ProCooling.com