Verdict: A very disappointing overclocker

With a mean and moody PCB housed in a distinctive black and orange box, you'd be forgiven for thinking that you'd just purchased a high-end AOpen motherboard.

However, at £74, this is definitely not a high-end motherboard. That said, it's not short of features, such as Intel HD Audio, provided by a Realtek ALC880 chip. That said, there aren't any digital S/PDIF outputs, just four standard analogue jacks.

At least the single EIDE port is sensibly located at the front edge of the PCB, away from the PCI-E and PCI slots, although the positioning and height of the Northbridge heatsink may make it difficult to fit overly large CPU HSFs. Unlike all the other 915-based motherboards in this Labs test, the Southbridge on the AOpen is not fitted with a heatsink.The location of the 24-pin ATX power socket may mean the bulky cable restricts airflow, but at least the 16x PCI-E slot is free from obstructions, being well clear of the DIMM sockets and Southbridge.

The BIOS includes one interesting feature: Power Master. In Performance mode, Power Master is supposed to dynamically overclock the CPU when applications require more speed. However, as the benchmark results on p77 show, we didn't detect any measurable performance gains when Power Master was enabled. Alternatively, Silent mode underclocks the CPU, drops its core voltage, and reduces the speed of the CPU HSF when the CPU is idle. However, the reference Intel HSF already has PWM, which dynamically reduces the speed of the HSF's fan in a similar manner, so Silent mode is somewhat redundant.

Despite having quite a few options in the BIOS, we were unable to increase the FSB of the AOpen beyond 215MHz, while keeping applications running stably. This is very disappointing, considering that all the other boards, except the Foxconn, overclocked much further, especially the Asus and Gigabyte.

The AOpen looks great, but its primary feature, Power Master, doesn't appear to provide any real benefit. It's well priced for a 915P-based board but, compared with motherboards such as the Asus and Gigabyte, it failed to grab our attention.

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