The AX4SPE is based upon Intel's 865 chipset. This chipset supports all of the current Intel Pentium 4 and Celeron processors on the market. The chipset supports 400 MHz/533 MHz/800 MHz FSB Pentium 4s and also supports Intel's latest P4 3.2 GHz Extreme Edition CPU, which was just recently announced. I'm not sure, however if this board supports Intel's next CPU, the Prescott, but Prescott isn't a factor till next year.

The board is a standard 305x240mm ATX motherboard, which fit nicely in my case. No issues with installation were present in terms of positioning of the power connectors or configuration of the slots. I like the fact that AOpen decided to include 6 PCI slots on the board, most boards only come with 5. However, with the included onboard equipment, it’s a luxury.

AOpen outfitted the AX4SPE with 4 DIMM slots (Dual-Inline Memory Modules) that each support up to 1 GB of unregistered non-ECC DDR RAM. This gives a maximum of 4 GB of memory supported by the motherboard. Memory speeds supported by the AX4SPE are 200/266/333/400 MHz DDR, giving a maximum theroetical memory bandwidth of 6.4 GB/second.

Included on the board are 6 PCI slots. While I love to see 6 PCI slots on a board, in my mind, the AX4SPE has enough stuff onboard, to make this almost unnecessary. Using the onboard 6 USB 2.0 slots, LAN, sound, as most users of this board would, leaves 6 open slots for things like a TV tuner, a modem, a SCSI controller, the included cables for SPDIF In/Out, 2 additional USB ports, and the Firewire cable.

SATA RAID is provided by the Silicon Image Sil3112A chip. This board supports up to 4 SATA hard disk drives in a RAID 0/1 or 0+1 striped configuration. IDE RAID support is provided by the Intel ICH5R SouthBridge. The A4XSPE supports up to 4 IDE devices and up to 4 SATA hard disk drives with the included onboard interfaces.

The backpanel I/O is populated with 6! USB 2.0 ports, Com 1 and 2 ports, Game port, a Broadcom Gigabit LAN, 3 audio jacks PS/2 mouse/keyboard connectors. I really liked the fact that Aopen included 6 USB 2.0 ports without the need for an additional cable. Further, they included a 2 port cable which allows for the 8 total USB 2.0 ports that the 865 supports.