Fan Noise

The AOpen i945Ga-PHS uses no active cooling, which is a key feature for the motherboard of a media center system.

Overclocking

When I first saw the limited overclocking options in the BIOS I did not expect too much overclocking. Since the chipset in use is the i945 which has an overclocking lock (see the overclocking section of our ABIT AL8 review) and there is no option to change the PCI-E speed I feared for the worst (= 225 FSB).



However it seems AOpen is synchronizing the PCI-Express clock to the FSB. A maximum overclock of 3700 MHz or close to 250 FSB is very respectable.

One little problem I would like to mention is that the motherboard will constantly beep if it does not receive a tachometer signal on the CPU fan header, when watercooled for example. You can not disable this feature in the BIOS. According to AOpen "You will see this in all our motherboards, it is security measure.".