Some people here like the VIA Apollo Pro P3 chipsets. The main concern I have with VIA is whether the board has AGP or PCI problems. Those are common with VIA boards partly because of poorly manufactured boards and improperly programmed BIOSs.

I don't know if I'd spend that kind of money on Aopen anything. It's a budget brand..

I don't know. I was quite fond of Aopen motherboards. VI15G was a very reliable 486 board, and AP5T was a great Pentium board. At one time I owned both of them and I regret having sold them. Some of their accessories were also quite decent. At one time they made some very sturdy and attractive looking chassis, and even some of their expansion cards (soundcards) were not too bad. While they were usually not considered high end, I always thought of their products as reliable and good value for the money.

Aopen made some fantastic boards back in the day. They were anything but budget and rivaled Asus and Intel for quality.

Not at that price. $50 at the most.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-SCB2-dual-Penti … =item3cbd4dd290

Anyone want to critique this one?

If you have an appropriate case and power supply already on hand, it could be nice. However, it doesn't look terribly expandable. You could build a pretty quick machine for running Win XP or 2000 on but I wouldn't expect to build a stellar gaming rig with the board.

Lol, just had a better look at the picture. 😁

Alright, so I admit my Aopen exposure is limited to the crappy/cheap in-house builds that a local computer retailer churned out.. and that I had to fix later on. I'll take all y'all's word for it that they actually made decent stuff.. even though I never saw any of it. 😁 Anyway, I still think that price is too high.

Hey - what do you guys think of this motherboard? Looks interesting.....
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Aopen-DX37-Plus...3cbd010eb

It looks like a nice motherboard, but I have to agree with Chewhacca on the price issue. The other problem is the fact that I don't see how the motherboard can actually take advantage of DDR ram, except for the fact that DDR seems a bit easier to get ahold of.

I've had good experience with Aopen (particularly my DX34-R U), but it wouldn't replace my Asus preference overall.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-SCB2-dual...3cbd4dd290

Anyone want to critique this one?

That looks like a good stable board, but I don't like its lack of ports... that's a big deal for me. I love expandable motherboards. 😀

The more I think about it - unless it is purely for fun, you could more easily get the same performance out of a single-chip athlon system.
At this point it would be like a dual socket 7 - why bother?

It actually doesn't make any sense to go through the cost and tremendously shitty aggro of building any old system for practical purposes. But some of us- myself included- just pursue it as a hobby. It's like, hmm...I wonder what NFS: HP ran like on a P2 with a Voodoo2 back in the day? Well, with this hobby, wonder no more ause I just plug my P2/ V2 PC in and away we go back in time. Tremendous fun really, sorta like building RC cars, planes and stuff.

sgt76 wrote:

It actually doesn't make any sense to go through the cost and tremendously shitty aggro of building any old system for practical purposes. But some of us- myself included- just pursue it as a hobby. It's like, hmm...I wonder what NFS: HP ran like on a P2 with a Voodoo2 back in the day? Well, with this hobby, wonder no more ause I just plug my P2/ V2 PC in and away we go back in time. Tremendous fun really, sorta like building RC cars, planes and stuff.

Yup, I consider building old computers a lil bit as if it's electric lego hehe 😜

Tetrium wrote:

electric lego

Man, you need to trademark that!

...and I just had a look at that Aopen 266 board. Would make for some serious retro shit, though not in the traditional sense. More like a 10 year old solution to a "modern" dual core system. Dual 1.4s, 2gb ram, modern o/s, one a them big ol' Radeon 3850s, scsi hard drives or some raided raptors.... serious FTW potential there.

I have to admit, I never had too much luck with anything produced by Aopen. Most everything I have gotten of theirs used has bad caps, and at one point during 2002 a local computer store near me called Atronix got in a large batch of bad Socket A boards from them that all failed memtest and bsod during win xp, 2k, and me installs, so they got stuck with massive returns on it. Don't remember which board it was specifically, but seems like it had a soccer ball or soccer player kicking a ball on the front of the box.

The bad capacitors might not have been entirely AOpen's fault; around that time there was a manufacturer (or multiple manufacturers?) that was supplying faulty ones and they were getting put into a lot of different makes of motherboards. I remember a roommate had a Gateway (socket A, coincidentally) and it had bad caps. That was the first time I had run into the problem. Then the Dell GX270s came along.. oh the humanity..

Apart from the bad cap thing, I always considered AOpen to be floating in the top somewhere.
Their PSU's are(were 😜) FSP's