DAMN IT! It did post though, so if I can latch onto one of those awesome liquid coolers, or maybe a phase exchange gas super cooler I know the pig will go 650 or better. I have to also note that Win2K has no issues with the board, except when it comes to handling the hard drives. The speeds are way slower than in 98, and that tells me that mighty Microsoft is having some issues dealing with UDMA33 control on some boards. That pissed me off a little, because even in my old K6-2 system these drives were at least moderately fast. That has little to do with the ProII board though, so no need to harp on that.

This board is very stable, how stable you say? Well, I got to fooling around when I couldn't get the 650 mark with my Cel 433. I decided that we would see just what I could play with to make things interesting. Seeing as how the board and chip were doing fine at 542 with default voltage of 2.0, would it hang at less? Yep. Stable at 1.9 vcore. Now that is cool. OC'd and under the rated core voltage. Of course I have a lot of case cooling, also lapped the piss out of the GlobalWin sink and the Celery with just a touch of thermal paste. Not really impressed with that?

Consider I used H-Oda's L2 Cache tweak to get the latency down to "0" and ECC disabled, memory set to CAS2, everything except for the vid bios shadowed, and that damned P2 microcodes thing shut off. I'd say that it is impressive enough. And considering also that Win2K has not puked on me yet because of these settings I am very pleased.

Ok, so you want some bench's, no prob. Only thing here is I have gone on a gaming strike of sorts till one of those "PROMISED" GeForce cards shows up so there aren't any gaming marks as of yet. If I get a dually system going, this will be a Win98 box once again and will then proceed to frag the hell out of some poor saps online. (Actual game play by yours truly may not be as predicted due to lack of practice.) Anyhow, on with the marks............ Test System Configuration

Processor Intel Celeron 466 @ 542 Mhz
Memory 128 Megs PC-100 SDRAM
Hard Disk Drive Quantum 6.4 Gig ATA-33
Video Card Diamond Viper V550
Operating System Windows 2000 Advanced Server

SiSoft Sandra Memory Benchmark

CPU/Mem Bandwidth 234MB/Sec
FPU/Mem Bandwidth 270MB/Sec

Not the usual pretty graphs, but it gets the job done

In my final conclusions this is one of the finest looking boards to date, and definitely a welcomed change from the drab blasé crap everyone pumps us full of on a daily basis. Nothing like popping the case to show your buds a nice shiny trick mobo. Definite kudos to Aopen for a job well done, and I have to say it one more time here fella's it's about damn time the working stiffs got mention. I personally can't think of a more fitting way to do it!

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