Pros: Tough, lots of PCI slots, 24K Platinum coated heat sink.
Cons: No ISA slots.

Extravagent? You had better believe it! AOpen has really outdone themselves this time slapping a BX Northbridge chipset with a heatsink plated in 24K platinum onto an ATX board with a foundation of black military PCB! I think that they figure we want to take our computer with all of its splendid innards into battle.

Foundation
Needless to say, the foundation that this board is based on is rather strong and can withstand significantly more punishment than the usual run of the mill motherboard. Besides its obvious physical and stress advantages, this is one of the few boards that I would be able to say is aestetically pleasing to the eye.

Processor
Aopen made this board in Pentium III flavor only. While not truly a bad thing, Aopen is now overlooking a major portion of today's computer users: the Athlon fiends. I have checked with some of my contacts over at AOpen and from what I have heard, there are no plans to release it in AMD-processor-compatible form. This is unfortunate but it's AOpen's loss.

Case Fit
Aopen obviously has some down-to-earth people in thier R&D department. While some motherboards have trouble fitting into some of today's compact cases that economical and office users are buying, this board fits perfectly in everything from a mini-tower on up. While I would not reccommend putting this board in a supertower, you certainly could.

Bus
The front side bus speeds are above average but not by much. The front side bus can reach speeds of up to 153MHz, allowing the use of high speed (133MHz) SDRAM, thereby speeding up the computer itself. The clock speed multipliers allow you to go all the way up to 8.0 and are fairly easy to set and/or reset in its jumperless design.

Memory Capacity
While some of the other features of this board may be incredible, the memory capacity built into the board is just average, being able to hold the usual 768MB of SDRAM DIMMs arrayed in three 256MB cards in each of the three availible "banks". While this is certainly acceptable and up to the current standards, it is by no means incredible or matching up to the standards of excellence that the rest of this board's components were held to.

Slots
This motherboard is just teeming with slots for you to stick in the latest and newest hardware. With one AGP slot, six PCI slots, and 2 EIDE ports for your Drive cables, this board is ready to handle almost anything you can throw at her. There is a minor problem, however. You can only use this board with up-to-date PCI compatable peripheral cards because you wont find a single ISA slot on this entire thing.

Drivers/BIOS
Since this board is mainly a revised and limited edition of AOpen's existing boards, the driver and BIOS updates for this board are incredible. As with all boards, some of the newest graphics card technologies are not yet supported but driver release is usually pretty prompt so you can expect support patches soon. Check out http://www.AopenAmerica.com/ for details.

Overall
Overall, I would have to say that this motherboard is incredible, offering its users speed, ports, flexibility, and heat management features that surpass almost any other motherboard. While it may be small and AOpen messed up on some things, this is a very strong release for domestic users and power users alike. On the scale of 5, however, I would have to give it a 4 as it does not allow users to use any ISA devices.