Overclocker Cafe - AOpen AK77-333 Mainboard Review

AOpen AK77-333 (KT333) Mainboard

Features

The AK77-333 is in the same linage as the AK77 Plus, but it is feature Rich with a capital R. There are quite a few goodies here to look at so let's get started.

It took a while but AOpen finally added onboard Dolby 5.1 sound. With native high quality sound support you audiophiles won't need to take up a PCI slot with your sound board anymore. It was a bit disappointing however that a S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface) card wasn't included with out test board to test out the S/PDIF connector on the board.

USB 2.0 is more talk now for the lack of USB 2.0 devices but the technology is here, now. USB 2.0 is ULTRA fast. How fast? Well USB 1.0/1.1 transfers data up to 1.5 Mbps for low speed devices and up to 12 Mbps for high speed devices. 2.0 supports transfer speeds of up to a whopping 480 Mbps. Yes you read correctly, that is a 40 fold increase. I've yet to play with a firewire device but it looks like the death shroud could be laid out for firewire with USB 2.0. Oh, did I mention there are two pairs of USB 1.1 ports AND two pairs of USB 2.0 ports? Eight USB devices! Now we're talkin'!

The AK77-333 also allows for faster hard drives; specifically the Ultra ATA-133 interface. To give you some idea of the speed advantages of the different interfaces, reference the chart below taken from the AOpen website.

Mode	Clock Period	Clock Count	Cycle Time	Data Transfer Rate
ATA 33	30ns	4	120ns	(1/120ns) x 2byte x 2 = 33MB/s
ATA 66	30ns	2	60ns	(1/60ns) x 2byte x 2 = 66MB/s
ATA 100	20ns	2	40ns	(1/40ns) x 2byte x 2 = 100MB/s
ATA 133	15ns	2	30ns	(1/30ns) x 2byte x 2 = 133MB/s

One of the best features on this board is that you have the ability to flash the mainboard's BIOS from within windows. No more creating a system boot disk and using Award Flash. We flashed our board here and it was as simple as a double click to unzip the file and a click on the “start flash.” Flashing a BIOS for a mainboard is now as easy as with other device BIOS flashing. Triple kudos to AOpen for this.

What the AOpen “Watch Dog Timer does is it reads the last system POST. If the system fails to POST, the Watch Dog will reset the system and redetect and enable the CPU’s default settings. This is a very nice and painless way to deal with an unsuccessful overclock.

The AOpen Die Hard BIOS is a nice safety feature I wish all motherboards had as an industry standard. This option entails having two BIOS chips. Should your machine become unusable from your fooling around with the BIOS or from a Virus that may attack the BIOS coding itself; you have a way out. By flipping a jumper, you bypass the original BIOS chip and defer to the backup BIOS chip allowing you to get back on your feet. This is one of those things that hopefully you will never need, but if you do, it is worth its weigh in gold. There is a three position toggle (not included in the extra stuff for our board) that allows the selection of the BIOS that will be engaged. The center position of the toggle engages neither, effectively disabling your box until you literally throw the switch.

The Dr. LED is an eight light panel that has a LED correspond to each of the following: CPU, Memory, Video, PCI, Audio, HDD (hard drive disk), KB (keyboard), and Boot O.K. The appropriate LED lights up should the system fail at that point in boot up. Too bad this is an optional instead of a standard feature.

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