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Introduction.The Pentium 4 chipset market is getting crowded with products from Intel, SiS, VIA and soon to be released products from Ali and ATI all competing for market share. Intel’s own Pentium 4 strategy has been somewhat convoluted with initial support only coming from the Rambus RDRAM compatible i850. Even though Intel tried to lead the market down the Pentium 4+i850+RDRAM route, the market had other ideas and was moving from PC-133 SDRAM to DDR (Double Data Rate) SDRAM. Intel is a fairly astute company and quickly realised that pushing the i850 chipset and Rambus RDRAM was not going to be accepted by the market and thus had to fall back upon other solutions. The obvious solution was to create a chipset which supported the preferred memory type of the market, DDR SDRAM. There is of course a precedent for this move nearly two years ago when Intel launched the i815 PC-133 SDRAM compatible chipset for the Pentium III when it became apparent that the Rambus RDRAM based i820 was not what the market desired. What makes this move remarkable is that Intel had to do this only a year to eighteen months later with it’s Pentium 4 compatible i850 and i845 chipset ranges. Initially the i845 was launched as a PC-133 compatible chipset, which we saw in boards such as the AOpen AX4BS Pro and Soyo SY-P4IS2. Whilst the i845 was a chipset which worked well, the pairing of the Pentium 4 to PC-133 SDRAM was something close to making the Pentium 4 feel like a 700 MHz chip. Only when we looked at the VIA P4X266 which paired the Pentium 4 to DDR SDRAM did we see how memory dependent Intel’s NetBurst architecture is. Much of this chipset strategy problem stems from Intel’s agreement with Rambus.Inc, the intellectual property firm which owns the rights to Rambus RDRAM. Quite how the agreement between Intel and Rambus affected the release of the i845D is not fully known, but it has been alleged that Intel had to delay its release due to legal issues. Intel’s official line is that there were engineering reasons why it had to delay the release. What is known is that the move away from Rambus RDRAM to DDR SDRAM has been a highly contentious issue for Intel. The i845D has been well recieved by motherboard manufacturers eager to produce DDR SDRAM compatible boards for the mainstream PC market. As a result we have an example of the AX4B from AOpen. This review marks a break with tradition here at Processor Emporium as we normally review the “Pro” series of boards from AOpen. This time we have opted to look at the mainstream version of AOpen’s Pentium 4 board. This review also marks another first for Processor Emporium as we will employ a new scoring system for motherboard reviews. This has been as a result of the need to provide greater differentiation between board scores for our readers whilst also rewarding examples of high quality engineering with appropriate scores. To see how the AX4B fares in this review, read on... Intel i845D.Like all Intel chipsets since the release of the i810 back in 1999, the i845D is based upon the Unified Hub Architecture. The i845D MGCH (Memory and Graphics Controller Hub), contains features such as support for up to 3 GB of main system memory (whether you can fit 3 GB of memory is another matter) along with standard features such as AGP 4X.
The i845 MGCH is complimented by the now familiar ICH 2 controller which looks after the PCI bus, Ultra ATA 100 Hard Disk Controller and the AC-97
compatible Audio codec.
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