The AOpen MX3W Pro-V is one of three boards in the MX3W Pro line of inexpensive Socket 370 Pentium III/Celeron micro-ATX boards based on Intel i180/ICH1 chipsets. These boards were sold starting in late 1999 and continued to receive BIOS updates until the middle of 2001. The MX3W Pro-V supports 250 nm Celeron Mendocino (PPGA) CPUs as well as 180 nm Pentium III and Celeron Coppermine (FC-PGA) processors. The BIOS allows for some overclocking as it allows for the FSB to be varied from 66 MHz to 166 MHz in about 20 discrete steps, there are memory strap settings for PC100 and PC133 as well as a limited set of jumper settings to keep the internal AGP and PCI buses around 33/66 MHz. There are also some settings for memory timings such as CAS latency and cycle time. However, CPU and RAM voltages are not adjustable and neither are fan speeds.
Onboard expansion slots
2 SDRAM slots, good for up to PC133.
3 32-bit, 33 MHz PCI slots
1 Audio modem riser slot
2 serial port headers
Back panel I/O
2 USB 1.1 ports
PS/2 keyboard and mouse
Parallel port
Serial port
Game port
Headphone/mic/line-in
This motherboard was in a computer that was being discarded. I picked it up so I could use it and a Celeron 900 (Coppermine) found in another dead motherboard to make a MythTV frontend. The motherboard originally had a PPGA Celeron 533 Mendocino in it but handled the Celeron 900 fine after flashing to the latest (6/22/2001) BIOS. You will need to use an FC-PGA heatsink to use FC-PGA processors as PPGA Celeron heatsinks do not seat properly on FC-PGA processors. There are five capacitors and an inductor right next to the socket in this board, so you need to get a heatsink that does not stick out beyond the edges of the socket. I used an Antec 60 mm 370/A heatsink and it was just small enough to work. There is *no* fan speed control on the MX3W, so the heatsink fan runs at 4500-5500 rpm unless you use an external fan speed controller like I did to reduce the fan RPM down to reasonable levels. There is no onboard NIC nor TV-out ports, so I added a PCI NIC and a PCI GPU and both work well. You will need to tell the BIOS to init the PCI GPU before the onboard graphics to make the PCI GPU work, though. The board does overclock a little bit and my Celeron 900 is running at 990 MHz, being limited by the fact that the PC100 SDRAM doesn't like to run over about 112 MHz speed and there is no PC66 memory strap in the BIOS.
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