AOpen decided to use the Award BIOS for their AX45-V however it's not the same version as most other boards, rather it seems like it's the same improved version we saw in the MSI KT3 Ultra.

As we can see BIOS is very organized basic memory speed controls can be adjusted here from 200, 266 or 333 MHz RAM speeds. When you enter the advanced DRAM control bank interleaving, RAS to CAS, burst lengths, etc. is now controlled by the System Performance. The modes range from Safe, Normal, Fast and Ultra with Safe having all the memory options turned to their most conservative settings while Ultra makes the memory work at its fastest.

From the start AOpen has told us that this is not a overclockers motherboard, and it was obvious when we went into the CPU clock control options. CPU multiplier adjustments is a little useless since all retail Pentium 4's are multiplier locked, the FSB increases in about 3-5 MHz increments. Our particular board had a special "reviewers" BIOS and a lot of weird FSB adjustments. We were also a little disappointed in the fact there were no memory voltage controls in the BIOS we worked with.

Our Corsair XMS PC2400 DDR can run at 166 MHz but needs a voltage of 2.8V to do so. Since it wasn't there, all the benchmarks were run with the RAM running at 266 MHz instead of 333MHz. Another interesting note was that there were two spots to set the memory speeds. Here in the CPU Clock Control and in the Adv. Chipset Options.

Since there were no voltage controls, we were only able to garner a 2.16 GHz out of our Williamette Pentium 4 2 GHz processor which equaled a 108 MHz FSB. Still it's free performance so we're not complaining!