articles
FORUMS!
links
contact

PC Database

Folding Team

SETI@HOME Team
RC5 Team
Genome Team

OCAU chat

click image for bigger pic

Those of you who read our review of the AOpen AX6BC Pro will remember that we highly recommended it at the time. In fact, the AX6BC line of boards would have to be my personal favourite of the single slot-1 BX-based boards. Rock solid stability, very respectable speed and a host of overclocking-friendly features make for a powerful combination. I've had a Pro unit in my personal machine for a long time and only replaced it because I wanted a dual-processor board. The Pro also formed the basis of my overclocked Celeron business, with a great many chips being brought to their full potential on it. Finally, my original water-cooling project was based on that same board. It was therefore with very great pleasure that I received the Millennium Edition from Servex.

For those of you who don't know, Servex are the Australian distribution arm of Acer, the Taiwanese parent company of AOpen. Although they don't sell directly to end users, when you buy an Acer, AOpen, Apacer etc product in Australia, the chances are very high that it was brought into the country by Servex. But let's not get distracted from the task at hand..

The motherboard is quite startling when you remove it from the box. Even my completely non-technical girlfriend thought it was cool. A platinum-plated heatsink on the BX (a step up in prestige from the Gold model), a platinum-plated plaque bearing the title "Millennium Edition", and the names of the 3 designers of the board written on the printed circuit board with the phrase "We design this board with pride...". Speaking of which, the PCB is black. Very black. Much blacker than it looks in the photos - it's so slick and shiny it looks like it has some kind of oil on it, but it's dry. This is the kind of thing you build a clear perspex case around to show off at LAN parties.

It seems likely to me that, bearing the future of the BX chipset in mind, this board is probably going to be the final member of a very prestigious family of motherboards. The last major revision of this line, the AX6BC, was a rock-solid jumperless board. The Pro model added the one thing that stopped it being the perfect overclocker's board of the time, in-bios core voltage adjustment. The Pro-II changed the capacitors near the slot-1 for larger units for greater stability. This family of motherboards has meant a lot to many overclockers, and in a tribute to that, AOpen have made a classic, a collectible, a peice of art to put in your PC. Furthermore, AOpen have announced their AX6C series now, a family of i820-based boards, so I think it's unlikely they'll make another major revision of this BX line.

Way to go, guys!