A lot has been made of the performance of the VIA Apollo chipset lately. In fact it would seem that their AGP implementation is a little lacking in the performance department. In some cases, at very high resolutions, some significant frame rate differences can be seen. However, this is much less serious in resolutions of 1024x768 and below. While this is still a detriment to gameplay, chances are VIA will fix many of these problems with a driver update before too long.
In most synthetic benchmarks, this motherboard performs as well as any of its BX counterparts, but in certain games (especially in the 1600x1200 resolution range), it lags behind a little. This may be reason enough not to want one of these boards, but with their ability to overclock to speeds never before achievable, these lags may wind up being trivial in the long run.
With over 30 different FSB settings, the AOpen board is one of the most complete overclockers we have tested. Not only does it allow all these different clock settings, but it is capable of doing it all in the BIOS, without having to fiddle with jumper settings. This has all been done before on a BX platform, however, the advantage comes with the new PCI and AGP dividers.
Earlier in the year when we reviewed the AX6BC Pro we talked about booting with a 153MHz frontside bus speed. At the time, this could only be done with a PCI video card and was not a viable overclocking option. Now, thanks to the AX63Pro's selectable AGP divider option of 2, AGP cards are able to run safely at a speed of 76.5Mhz when the system bus is screaming along at 153MHz, which is only about 10MHz above the AGP card's stock speed level of 66MHz.
Coupled with some of our favorite EMS Technologies PC133 HSDRAM modules, the AOpen AX63Pro is an overclocker's dream. With the capability of easily doing 133MHz and keeping all of the components within spec, this board will allow for some serious overclocking of native 100MHz FSB CPUs