Setup of the AX4SPE was both painless and easy to do. The inclluded instruction manual is very detailed and thorough. It's especially gratifying to open up a motherboard box and find illustrated clear step by step instructions for instlaling the board. After removing my old motherboard, I installed the P4 2.8 533, inserted 512MB of DDR memory into 2 color matched memory slots to enable dual channel memory and mounted the motherboard. At this point, I inserted the Ti4200 8x 128MB video card that we use in our reviews and booted the machine. After setting the first boot device to CDROM in the BIOS and checking to make sure that the CPU was correctly identified, I turned off the computer, plugged in the hard drives and CDROM and proceeded to install Windows. I described my methodology to do a minimum boot configuration because sometimes a board arrives DOA or other problems occur on the first install. In this case no such problems existed.

AOpen outfitted their board with an excellent software and hardware bundle. It's extremely nice to see both Firewire and USB cables in the box. A lot of manufacturers skimp in this area, forcing you to purchase the cables separately. Also nice is the inclusion of the SPDIF In/Out cable which again most motherboard manufacturers sell as an additional cost. Aopen went out of their way ncluding 8 total USB 2.0 ports and 2 Firewire IEEE-1394 ports.

The software bundle consists of Norton's AntiVirus 2003, the latest antivirus software from Peter Norton's company that has been making antivirus software for over 20 years. Norton's is actually my favorite antivirus software, as I find McAffee's a bit clunky and Panda AntiVirus I haven't used. It’s a great addition to the AX4SPE Max bundle.

AOpen includes some very useful utilities with their bundle. First is their Silentek Hardware monitor. When running under Windows, Silentek monitors the voltage setting of the 3.3V AGP sot, the 5V , the +12V -12V the -5V, the SVsb and the Voltage of the battery. It also monitors the CPU and up to 2 System Fan speeds from within Windows and the temperature of the CPU/System/CPU Kernal. These are very useful when you want to monitor your temperatures under full load. Also useful is the ability to control the fans, ensuring that the PC is running smoothly and silently.

The second useful utility is a WinBIOS. This allows the user to update their BIOS from within Windows instead of flashing the BIOS from a floppy disk. It comes with a detailed help screen which makes use of the utility very easy and straightforward. When checking for a update on the AOpen website, I noticed that the latest BIOS was dated earlier than the BIOS on my motherboard 7/15/2003. The latest BIOS is dated 5/22/2003 on AOpen’s website