Built around the same "Black Beauty" PCB as the AX4B Pro (also reviewed here), the AX45V is one of a growing number of motherboards using the SIS 645 chipset with its support for the latest PC-2700 standard of DDR memory.

Feature wise it's very much the same as the AX4B Pro, with six PCI and three DIMM slots and a single CNR slot. The onboard audio chip is a Realtek ALC201, which unfortunately doesn't support surround sound.

The AGP slot is one of those that are annoyingly close to the DIMM slots. There is absolutely no room available between the end of the AGP card and the DIMM retaining levers. This could be a problem when DIMM 1 is populated and you need to remove the memory module while there is an AGP card installed. You are left with three options; don't use DIMM 1, remove the video card before trying to remove the stick of memory, or gently bend your AGP card to the side in order to release the latch. Irritating...

On the plus side Aopen has positioned the two IDE ports and FDD port to the left of the DIMM slots, giving plenty of room to route the cables away from the board.

One thing to make sure of is that you load the SIS AGP drivers; these are not native to Windows and without them your graphics performance will obviously suffer.

Unfortunately the AOpen AX45V doesn't perform as well as it looks and is slower than Asus's P4S 333 board; and also slower than some of the other 845 DDR boards in this roundup.