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hardware tech site for the rest of us.
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AOpen AK89 Max / AK86-L (AMD 64) Mainboard Check out the front panel connectors. As I get older and my eyes get worse, color coding is infinitely preferable to looking for a manual or squinting to read a 0.1 size font.
The last shot we have of the AK86-L is the rear I/O panel. Pretty standard fare with the exception of only having one COM port. COM ports however are about as useful as a PCI slot now. People still use them but generally its utility is on the decline.
BIOS (AK86-L) AOpen has been using the Award BIOS for sometime now. Personally, I prefer this to the AMI BIOS that adorns most ASUS products but this is a matter of preference. Let's take a look at the meat of what you will use here. Both the AK86-L and AK89 Max have the option of saving your BIOS settings with the EEPROM. What this does is to allow you to save your tweaked out personal settings and should you have to clear the CMOS, just select Load EEPROM Defaults and Blam-O your personal settings are restored.
Starting out with the Advanced Chipset Features screen and the DRAM Configuration we see lots of adjustments are available.
Instead of listing out the obvious, below are screen shots of the ranges offered for your memory. It is always nice to see the ability to change multiple variables and settings manually rather than have them be set automatically by the system.
The Frequency and Voltage control menu looks pretty standard but it is not. Your front side bus can be adjusted from 200 up to 255MHz in 1MHz increments. That is quite a reach, more so than I think the current crop of FX chips would be able to attain. What was nice was that as we overclocked the board, the PCI/AGP bus frequencies adjusted themselves so that they always were as close as possible to their defaults of 33.33 and 66.66MHz respectively.
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