AOpen AK77-333 (KT333) Mainboard

Layout

The AK77-333 sports five PCI slots, one AGP with a retention mechanism for the VGA card, and one CNR.  The CNR is there mainly to satisfy the fairly large OEM market AOpen supports.  Three DIMM slots are here, each able to support up to a gig stick of DDR333.  AOpen’s placement of the DIMM slots takes into account what a few other board makers don’t; keeping the DIMM slots positioned far enough away from the AGP card so you don’t need to remove your VGA card to swap out RAM.  Just to the lower right of the DIMMs are two ATA-66/100/133 IDE connectors and a standard floppy drive connector.  There are also three fan connectors but only two are usable, as that the Northbridge fan uses one.

No worries about fat heatsinks.  We plopped on a Swiftech MCX-462 and no clearance issues presented themselves.

What was a tad confusing was why AOpen moved the ATX power connector from its position at the top left of the DIMM slots on the AK77-Plus to the left of the Northbridge.  While we didn’t have a big problem with this, it now forces you to ensure your power wires are tied up out of the way.  Too easily the lines can end up over top of your heatsink’s fan, mildly obstructing airflow.  The borad on the left of the two boards below and the left pic are of the AK77-333 and the other board is the AK77-Plus.

  

AOpen utilizes an active cooling solution for its Northbridge chipset.  Pretty shiny.

Here you can see the four pair of USB connectors.

     

The Die Hard BIOS we explained earlier…

The AK77-333 is not exactly a jumperless board.  There is a front side bus select jumper to choose either a 100-129MHz or a 130-248MHz range.  Once you select one of the two ranges, the bus speed is controlled through the BIOS in 1MHz increments.  The multiplier for the board is another story.  Four dip switches located just above the socket can be used to manually select the desired multiplier from 5.5 up to 12.5 in .5 increments.  As far as an OEM or standard type board, this is inconsequential.  From an overclocking standpoint, it means you are going to be popping your case open when you need to change CPU multiplier ratios.  AOpen caters toward their solid reputation of stability with overclockability being second fiddle.