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A
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AOpen AK77 Plus (KT266A) Mainboard Three
onboard fan headers can be found but only two are actually useful.
The aluminum heatsink/fan mounted to the Northbridge takes up one leaving
only two free. This is not viewed as a detractor of the AK77 because any
high-speed fans that you are likely to run will be powered off the main power
supply to avoid burning out a mainboard header. The only time I use the onboard headers is to plug in
aftermarket chipset heatsinks, i.e. Tt Crystal ORB/ Blue ORB. Before I get a rash of e-mails; if you choose, you can run a
high speed Delta fan off a mainboard header but be advised that you are living
dangerously. The
Northbridge heatsink is a sharp and shiny looking little number.
It appears to be mounted with thermal epoxy as opposed to the more
desirable clips that most chipsets mount with.
I am speculating that it is attached with epoxy but I did not remove it
to confirm this; but it seems a logical assumption.
VIA's VT8233 Southbridge chipset offers support for 6 USB ports and ATA 100 in addition to 6 channel sound and an onboard NIC. The latter two features were absent with the AOpen AK77 Plus. This is confusing why they chose not to take advantage of this and include them, especially the NIC. Lots of “sound guys” prefer to use their own high end sound cards but I’ve not come across a “NIC guy” who is married to their favorite network adapter and not willing to part from it. AOpen did utilize the AC97 onboard sound which is straight forward functional audio. There is a definite difference in sound quality between it and the high end audio cards but nothing you are going to really lament over.
The
VT8233 also provides four IDE Channels. Two
of these are ATA100 On-board RAID, powered by the PROMISE FastTrak 100 Lite
Controller. The Promise Fast Trak
100 supports stripping (RAID 0) and mirroring (RAID 1.)
The AK77 Plus
(A) can support up to eight IDE devices if you so desire.
The
front side bus is selected through the BIOS.
The range available is controlled through a hardware jumper that selects
between two levels. One position
for settings between 100-129MHz and another for 130 all the way up to 248MHz.
That’s nosebleed territory! The
BIOS offers adjustability of the FSB in 1MHz increments.
My only real complaint here is with the CPU multiplier adjustment.
It is done through four dip switches.
There has been talk about Intel wanting to eliminate floppy drive disks
and AOpen is still using dip switches?!?
Stop living in the past and put that in the BIOS guys!
The Dip switches do provide for multipliers from 5 to 12.5.
Also
present on the AK77 Plus (A) are Wake On Modem, Wake On LAN, Keyboard Wake-up,
and a Select IrDA Connector. Features In
addition to the typical mainboard features, AOpen has a few features of their
own that come as either standard equipment or as options you can opt for when
you order the board. These features
include.. AOpen
“Watch Dog Timer How
many times have you started cussing when you made an unsuccessful overclock
attempt and had to open up the case to reset the CMOS jumper? Apparently some of the folks at AOpen have had the same
problem. Except that they were in a
position to add a feature into the AK77 mainboard to save them the hassle.
What the 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.
I think it’s a safe bet to say that AOpen has a view overclockers in
their midst. Nice one guys! Die
Hard BIOS (optional) 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 monkeying with the BIOS or from a Virus
that may attack the BIOS coding itself; you have a way out.
Jumper JP30 when set, bypasses the original BIOS chip and defers 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. Dr.
LED (optional) Is
there anyone out there that REALLY knows all the POST error codes?
If I hear five beeps that tells me the same thing as three or ten beeps;
something is not working. 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.
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All pages Copyright © 2000 - 2008
by R. Dean Barker.
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