Labs

The AX4B is the most basic board on test: it has integrated AC97 audio, but that's about it. There are no RAID, USB 2 or NIC controllers integrated, and while this would be fine at £70 the AX4B costs £102. And where other boards have useful extras such as LEDs for diagnosing problems or additional USB ports, AOpen is minimalist, not even providing a paper manual.

Expansion is par for the course; the five PCI slots, three DIMM sockets and obligatory

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CNR slot should suffice for most users. It's good to see that the extra space gained by omitting a sixth PCI slot has been used at the top of the bank of slots, which means memory can be removed or installed without removing the AGP card. The rest of the layout is reasonable, although the EIDE connectors may be mounted too low down for shorter cables to reach.

There are three fan connectors for cooling the components, which could come in handy if you take advantage of the overclocking features in the BIOS. The FSB can be increased in 1MHz increments, while the CPU voltage can be increased to 1.85V. Another neat feature is the Watchdog Timer, which resets the FSB to default if it has been overclocked too much. This saves resetting the CMOS and losing other settings.

AOpen has been beaten by the strong competition in this Labs, as the AX4B offers little to recommend it. Even the full version of Norton AntiVirus 2002 gains it little ground. Performance is nothing exceptional, and the price is too high for the features on offer.