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With a recent history of impressive BX motherboards coupled with low prices, it is no surprise that AOpen motherboards have found their way into many of our reader's systems. The AX63Pro strives to continue this tradition by offering some great performance enhancing options and bringing the price down even further.

Based on the VIA Apollo Pro 133 chipset, the AX63Pro is able to pack some features not yet available on Intel motherboards, and to do it at a cost with which we can all agree. So, let's see what this board is made of.

Designed like so many of AOpen's boards, the AX63Pro is a well laid out motherboard and makes very good use of the space allowed. With only a couple of awkward component placements, this board will surely become a staple component of many systems. Our only gripes are the tightness of the space between the AGP slot and the DIMMs (which was probably unavoidable considering how many slots this baby has) and the location of the floppy connector (right between the CPU and the serial ports).

With its fancy color-coded connectors and gold colored chipset heatsink, the AOpen board is certainly something of a looker. While adding gold colored heatsinks has become something of a fad lately, it really means nothing in the scheme of things, but I guess if you want the pimpest motherboard on the block, you need the gold heatsink and multi-colored connectors.