I recently got an AOpen AX3S Plus motherboard, which is a Pentium III based computer.

Works very well. Aside from the usual stuff, it has Dr. Voice which actually tells you what problems the motherboard may be having as opposed to a sequence of system beeps, which is pretty cool. There are a couple of things I've also noticed with this motherboard.

It is jumper-less with regards to CPU detection, as with any Pentium III motherboards (My Dell Dimension 4100 has that), and that it actually has the option in which I can set the FSB and CPU multiplier in the BIOS. Unfortunately, changing the multiplier to say like 3x does nothing and the FSB can only go as low as the motherboard is currently set at with regards to the CPU. I currently have a Pentium III 800mhz with 133 FSB and I thought I could get away with underclocking it so that I have a slightly better chance at playing older Windows games that are speed sensitive for example, as opposed to just disabling caches which only gets me down to 386 equivalent speeds. Now, I'm curious to see if there is a BIOS patch that allows me to manually underclock the CPU or if such CPU multiplier software exists for a motherboard like this.

I've also noticed that it has a built-in IDE RAID controller. Given that I have never used the RAID capabilities before, I'm curious to see how well it fairs and if I can use both the standard and the RAID IDE controllers at the same time.

Any thoughts are welcome. 😀