Nice Board for the Money
Written: Jun 06 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Jumper-less design works great, relatively inexpensive
Cons: requires BIOS flashing in certain scenarios
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| harleyds's Full Review: AOpen Slot 1 AX6B Motherboard |
Back at the beginning of 2000, I needed a motherboard fast. Mine died after December 30th, 1999. Apparently, I never checked to see if my own computer was Y2K compliant. A friend recommended I look at the AOpen boards. Sure enough, the AOpen MB’s were inexpensive and had all the features I needed. In addition to the 1 AGP, 4 PCI and 2 ISA slots, this board was also a jumper-less design. This means I don’t have to scan through the manual to configure all the jumper settings before I get to turn it on.
Installation was a piece of cake. The board fit perfectly into my old case. All the mounting holes and external ports matched up perfectly. After plugging in the main power cables, attaching the CPU and putting in my memory, she booted up fine and once again I had a PC! I began to install my hardware one at a time and found that not everything worked. After doing some troubleshooting, I narrowed down my problem to my modem, Palm Pilot HotSync cradle, and my serial connection for my Olympus camera. Funny revelation, anything that needs a COM port doesn’t work. I did some more investigating and found this particular AOpen board requires a BIOS upgrade for the COM ports to work.
After speaking to my friend, he said that AOpen boards sometimes require a BIOS upgrade depending on the type of hardware you run with it. I thought this was a little odd. This is my 10th MB in over 11 years working on computers and this is the first time I had to do a BIOS update to get the COM ports working. Well at this point I had no choice so I download the update from AOpen’s site at http://english.aopen.com/tech/download/mbbios/ax6b.htm and proceeded to flash my BIOS. After that everything worked fine.
Coincidentally, another friend of mine also bought the same exact board I did. After he ran the BIOS update for the COM ports, he ran into another problem. His board refused to recognize his Matrox Millennium G400 AGP video card. After researching the AOpen site, he found there is an update for the AGP port to recognize 16 MB cards. Well even after he updated the AGP port, he still could not get his card recognized. He ended up returning his board.
Overall
I gave the AX6B motherboard 4 stars since it works great. Its missing a star because they, in my humble opinion, should not have released a board that requires so many updates just to get the COM ports working. After the update everything works great, all my memory chips and the different CPU’s I had inserted were instantly detected.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 80
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Epinions.com ID:
harleyds
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Member: David
Location: Sunrise, FL
Reviews written: 39
Trusted by: 33 members
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