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AOpen AK77 Plus (KT266A) Mainboard Manufacturer: AOpen By
Dean Barker (1/08/2002)
Introduction
AOpen has been putting out high quality components for some time now. So it was only a matter of time before they weighed in on the KT266A wars. The AK77 Plus (A) is priced on average, about $25 less than its competition. Does that mean it is of lower quality because its less expensive? Absolutely not. I have had numerous AOpen boards in the past and they have always shown to be excellent performers and feature rich for your overclocking adventures. The AK77 Plus is no different but we will get to that in a moment. We want to extend our thanks to AOpen for supplying this review board for us to play with. What you get.
The AOpen AK77 Plus is packaged with a see through top that really shows off the looks of the board. The box is a little tricky, as it is labeled AK77 Pro Series rather than AK77 Plus. Our test board today is based on the KT266A chipset which is the drop in replacement for the often problematic KT266 chipset. To identify that you have a KT266A rather than a KT266 board, a quick check of the mainboard's package will provide you a product code that you can quickly use to cross reference the package in order to confirm what chipset your board is based on. Upon opening up the package you find in addition to the mobo: two users guides, one for the AK77 Plus mainboard and one for the ATA100 RAID; a FastTrak 100 Lite RAID driver disk; IDE cables; a bracket with two additional USB ports to install in an expansion port if you wish, Driver disk, and a copy of Norton Anti-Virus 2001. Also included is an installation poster that is very well done. This poster is a “down and dirty” what you need to know to install the board, if you don’t want to read the entire manual. Kudos to AOpen on the install poster. Excellent documentation! Nothing is left out so you aren't stuck scratching your head on an install issue.
Layout The
AK77 Plus starts out on the right foot as far as coolness goes.
The black PCB is infinitely more pleasing that the standard green or tan
of most other mobos. The board features five PCI slots, one AGP, and one CNR
Expansion slot (Communication and Network Riser (CNR) that allows audio and
modem configurations on a single card. - AKA Junk you will never want to put in
your box.) Three 184-pin DDR DIMM
slots are present, that can support up to a gig stick of memory each.
With memory prices the way they are now; having 3 gigs of RAM is not
completely unheard of. The DIMMs are placed with sufficient space between them and
the AGP slot so as to not interfere with video card installation and removal.
Immediately to the left of the DIMM slots is the power supply connector.
Its placement is a mixed bag of nuts.
It is a bit awkward to unplug it with the memory installed because of the
minimal space between it and the first DIMM slot.
On the flip side, its placement takes it a bit further away from the
socket. You are much more likely to
want more room around the socket for installing heatsinks that will get swapped
around much more often than the plugging and unplugging of the power supply
cable. The power supply
connector’s placement also plays its part in the grouping of all the
connectors for the mainboard cables being closer together; to alleviate the
clutter that often times arises.
The
AK77 Plus comes with the standard two rear USB ports. It also has the ability to add four more USB ports via two
additional headers. AOpen saw fit
to include a bracket fitted with two USB ports that fits into any free rear
access typically used for PCI cards. The
AGP slot is notable for it’s sporting a retention clip. The clip is located on the rear of the slot and functions in
the same manner as a DIMM retention clip. While
a nice and novel feature, I’m not sure how useful this is.
If your box suffers a blow with enough force to knock your AGP card out
of place than you may and probably will have bigger things to worry about.
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reserved.
All pages Copyright © 2000 - 2008
by R. Dean Barker.
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