I recently reviewed the AOpen AK77 Pro(A)-133 motherboard which has the KT266a chipset. The AOpen AK77-333 has the newest and best AMD chipset on the market, the Apollo KT333. The VIA Apollo KT333 is the first VIA chipset to feature DDR333 memory offering 25% more memory bandwidth to the CPU. Supporting DDR200/266/333 memory and a complete range of 200/266MHz Front Side Bus AMD Athlon™ XP and AMD Duron™ processors, the VIA Apollo KT333 provides lightning fast access to the faster system memory enabling stunning performance across the full application range.
- Supports AMD Duron™ and Athlon™ Socket A processors
- 200/266MHz FSB settings
- Support for AGP 2X/4X
- Supports up to 4.0GB DDR200/266/333 SDRAM
- 266MB/sec high bandwidth North/South Bridge V-Link
- Support for Advanced Communications Riser (ACR) Card Standard
- Integrated 6 channel AC-97 Audio
- Integrated MC-97 Modem
- Integrated 10/100 BaseT Ethernet and 1/10Mb HomePNA controller
- Support for ATA 33/66/100
- 6 USB ports, UHCI compliant
- Advanced power management capabilities including ACPI/OnNow and AMD’s PowerNow™
- 552-pin BGA VT8366A North Bridge
- 376-pin BGA VT8233 South Bridge The AOpen AK77-333 has many cool features, most of which you will see in more detail later in this review. Before I continue I just want to point out a few of the new cool features. The biggest thing about this motherboard is that it officially supports 2700 DDR, this motherboard supports ATA-133, it has 8 USB ports, 4 of which are USB 2.0, it support SPDIF interface, and it also comes with Norton Antivirus.
- Support 266MHz(EV6) System Bus for AMD Athlon / XP & Duron Socket A CPU
- Support PC2700 / PC2100 / PC1600 DDR SDRAM
- Jumper-less Design
- CPU clock ratio from 5.0 to 12.5
- Support 1X / 2X / 4X AGP mode
- AC’97 2.2 Audio support / Audio Codec onboard (5.1 channel)
- Supports 4 USB V2.0 ports via additional USB2.0 cable (optional)
- Supports 4 USB V1.1 ports (via optional USB cable)
- Enlarged Aluminum Heatsink for Better Heat Dissipation
- CPU Vcore Adjustment for Overclockers through BIOS Setting (1.1V ~1.85V)
- Dr. LED (Upgrade optional)
- Watch Dog Timer
- Support SPDIF interface
- AC Power on Auto Recovery
- DIE-HARD BIOS with External Controller (Upgrade optional)
- Hardware Monitoring
- 1MHz Stepping Frequency Adjustment
- Chassis Intrusion Detector
- Support Ultra DMA/133 HDD (Additional UDMA/133 Cable included)
- Wake-On-LAN / / RTC Timer / Keyboard / Mouse
- PCI Rev 2.2 Compliant
- Resetable Fuse Providing Short Circuit Protection for Keyboard and USB Device
- ACPI S3 (Suspend to RAM) and S4 (Suspend to Disk)
- AOpen Bonus Pack CD (Norton Anti-Virus included)
The AOpen AK77-333 motherboard comes in a cool box, just like its predecessor. It has a lot of specs and logos as well as a window so you can see the board.
The AOpen AK77-333 motherboard comes with an easy installation guide and a manual. The easy installation guide is the main points of the motherboard that you need to know for installation and the manual is in-depth on everything.
Both are very well written and easy to understand, I like the fact that they include an easy installation guide because it has key points that you need. I had a much easier and quicker time finding information about jumpers, and dip switch settings than I would have looking through the manual.
AOpen provides a black ATA and floppy with the motherboard and a yellow ATA-133 one as well. It’s cool that they have one of the IDE and FDD cables black but it would have been better if the ATA-133 had matched. The motherboard also comes with 2 CDs, one is the installation CD which has drivers and applications and the other is Norton anti virus 2002 which is the best anti virus software out there in my opinion.
The AOpen AK77-333 motherboard is capable of handling 4 USB 2.0 devices like I mentioned before. USB 2.0 is suitable for high-performance devices such as high-quality video conferencing cameras, high-resolution scanners, and high-density storage devices. In addition, USB 2.0 supports old USB 1.0/1.1 software and peripherals, offering impressive and even better compatibility to customers. Below is a picture of the USB 2.0 cable which you connect to one of the headers on the motherboard, we will see those headers later.
The motherboard sports a black PCB just like the AOpen AK77 Pro(A)-133 motherboard Pro did. They call it the “Black Beauty PCB,” whatever you call it I say it looks good. The motherboard has an AGP slot, 5 PCI, and a CNR slot, like the AK77-Pro I would have rather seen another PCI however some people may get more use out of a CNR slot.
The AOpen AK77-333 has an aluminum heatsink fan combo on the KT333 northbridge so that it does not get too hot. I pulled off the heatsink to see that it was held on by thermal tape just like the AK77 Pro(A)-133 I am glad AOpen is using active cooling but having thermal compound or epoxy would be better than thermal tape. I removed the thermal tape so that I could get a good picture of the KT333 northbridge then reattached it with thermal epoxy.
USB 2.0 is controlled by the VIA VT6202 chip, you can see right above the chip there are 2 sets of blue jumpers, these are the 2 jumpers for the USB 2.0 header. Each one supports 2 USB devices but if you want to use all 4 you will need to get another USB 2.0 header. You can also see to the far left of the picture the USB 1.0/1.1 header if you want more than 2 USB ports which are built onto the board.
The AOpen AK77-333 comes with a die-hard BIOS with optional upgrade, this feature which you can upgrade to is a backup BIOS. You can install a 2nd BIOS chip which is useful incase your motherboard is infected with a BIOS virus you will have a backup. This would also be a good feature for overclockers who flash their BIOS a lot, the only bad thing is that it is not included.
The AOpen AK77-333 motherboard uses a DIP switch at the top of the board above the socket which controls the multiplier of the CPU. When all the switches are left in the middle the BIOS auto detects it. You can change the positioning of the switches for different multipliers if your CPU is unlocked. I do not like having to use DIP switches to change the multiplier it makes overclocking much more complicated than it needs to be. I would have liked to have been able to change the multiplier from the BIOS, it would have made overclocking a lot better.
Below on the left-hand picture is a shot of the socket area of the motherboard, AOpen is using the same heatsink fan combo that they used on the AOpen AK77 Pro(A)-133 motherboard. One thing that they changed, which I am very happy to see because it was one of the few things that was not good about the AK 77 Pro is they moved the ATX power supply connector away from the DIMM slots so that it can be easily plugged and unplugged while memory is installed. The socket looks to have a good amount of room around the socket just as the AK 77 Pro did. The DIMM slots are also nice and far away from the AGP slot so that you don’t have to remove your AGP video card to take out RAM.
The AOpen AK77-333 comes with the standard I/O layout, 2 PS/2, 2 USB, 2 serial, parallel, the onboard sound and game port which uses the AC97 codec. The sound from the onboard audio is not bad for everyday users which this motherboard is intended for but if you want a high quality sound you will want to get a sound card.
The jumpers are designed onto the board well, and where they should be. All of them are in the bottom front part of the motherboard, relative to the front of your case. The AOpen AK77-333 has many jumpers which means you have a lot of options. There is infrared, Wake On LAN, a fan header, the LED and switch jumpers for your case, CMOS jumper, and Dr. LED which is an optional diagnostic LED system. The motherboard also has an onboard PC speaker which I always like.
The BIOS is the standard AWARD layout, you can see that the BIOS contains most of the same main sections as other motherboards do, but lets see what lies within each of these.
The “Advanced BIOS features” menu is the same as that of the AK 77 Pro, it contains cache options, boot order, and some other optional settings. The “Integrated Peripherals” menu has all of the onboard, IDE, USB, PCI and other option which you can pick and choose from.
The “Advanced Chipset Features” menu has 3 submenus and 2 options. The 3 submenus are “DRAM Clock/Drive Control,” “AGP P2P Bridge Control,” and “CPU and PCI Bus Control.”
The 2 submenus of importance from the “Advanced Chipset Features” section are the “DRAM Clock/Drive Control” and “AGP P2P Bridge Control” I found the DRAM Clock/Drive Control menu was still very lacking in memory tweaking options like the AK 77 Pro was. The only thing that is in there which is useful is the “SDRAM CAS Latency Time,” “DRAM Queue Depth,” and “DRAM Command Rate.” The “AGP P2P Bridge Control” menu however is good, it has all the options you really need to get the most out of your AGP card.
The “Frequency/Voltage Control” menu has CPU voltage which can go up to 1.85v. AOpen motherboards are not the best choice for overclockers because there are no voltage options for DIMM, AGP, or I/O which make overclocking much more stable.
The system clock is selected by either a table or manually, the table displays a list of FSB options and the manual option lets you put in any number for the FSB from 1 to 248. I think that the table option is not needed because the manual setting is better and easier.
All testing will be done at 32 bit color, vsync is off, AA is off, and all of the memory options are at the most aggressive settings. All the eye candy will be turned on at its highest for all of the game testing. I have benchmarked with some popular software at 1024×768, all of the settings were the same during testing with both motherboards. Here is a WCPUID screen shot of the default speed of the CPU.
Test Bed
- AOpen AK77-333
- AOpen AK77 Pro(A)-133
- AMD Thunderbird 1.2Ghz
- Corsair 512MB XMS2700
- 3DPower Geforce 3
- Antec 300w PSU
I benchmarked with the AOpen AK77 Pro(A)-133 which is labeled in all of the graphs as KT266a and then I benchmarked with the AOpen AK77-333 which is labeled as KT333.With the SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic benchmarking the AK77-333 is actually scores a very tiny bit lower than the AK77 Pro(A)-133. The AK77-333 should perform better than the AK77 Pro(A)-133 but does not.
The SiSoft Sandra Multi-Media benchmarking yielded the same lower scores for the AK77-333 it is only a little less, but again it should be higher seeing how it is their newest board.
The SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth benchmarking however did have better results with the AK77-333 as it should, there is not much of a gain in performance but there is some. If I had more options in the BIOS for tweaking the memory I could have gotten a lot better score.
3DMark2000 scores also improved from KT266a to the KT333. The AK77-333 motherboard was able to pull 501 point ahead of the AK77 Pro(A)-133.
3DMark2001SE got about the same boost in the final score. The AK77-333 got 455 more points than the AK77 Pro(A)-133, not a whole lot of performance but about what I expected.
Serious Sam usually doesn’t change very much in FPS unless there is a drastic change in the system. As you can see Serious Sam only got 0.5 FPS more on the AK77-333.
And finally Quake III running the Demo001 timedemo jumped up 9.5 FPS on the AK77-333 which is a nice improvement.
Overclocking with this motherboard was a task in itself, because AOpen does not focus on overclocking there are many features which overclockers need that are missing from the AK77-333. The AK77-333 uses DIP switches to change the multiplier of the CPU which is more of a hassle than if it was done through the BIOS.
I was only able to push the FSB up to 156 and have it be stable, which is how high I was able to get the AK77 Pro(A)-133. I was able to boot into windows at 166 and run light things, however as soon as I loaded up Quake III my system locked up. After playing around with different settings I was able to get the system up and running at 9×156 which is 1404Mhz. Even when dropping the multiplier lower I was not able to reach a higher FSB.
With the SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic benchmarking after overclocking I did get some higher scores, about as much as I was expecting.
The SiSoft Sandra Multi-Media benchmarking yielded the same boost in scores while overclocked compared to the default speeds.
The SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth benchmarking also got better results while overclocked as it should. If I had more options in the BIOS for tweaking the memory I could have gotten a lot better score.
3DMark2000 scores also improved from KT266a to the KT333. Overclocked I was able to pull 564 point ahead of the default setting results.
3DMark2001SE had an increase of 397 point after overclocking, not very much but this is about the norm of score improvement when overclocking the CPU. 3DMark2001SE is mainly for testing of video cards which is why there is not a huge margin.
Serious Sam gained 2 FPS while overclocked compared to the results from the default speeds. Like I mentioned before Serious Sam does not usually gain in large numbers.
To my surprise Quake III actually lost 3.4 FPS when I rebenchmarked at the overclocked speeds. I ran the benchmarks a few times after rebooting to make sure that it wasn’t a fluke, and it wasn’t. I am not sure why there was a drop in the FPS but there was.
Conclusion
Having tested the AK77 Pro(A)-133 before this board I saw a few improvements. The ATX power supply connector was moved to a better location, a few memory-tweaking options were added, USB 2.0 was added, and of course the new KT333 chipset is being used.
The AOpen AK77-333 motherboard is much like the AK77 Pro(A)-133 both not being the best board for overclockers. Just because they are not the best overclocking boards does not mean that they are not good.
The Aopen AK77-333 has a lot to offer with its ATA-133, USB 2.0, dual BIOS capability, lots of room around the socket, and a cool looking PCB. I would recommend this motherboard to non-overclockers who want a great motherboard with a lot of features, if you are looking for an overclocking motherboard I don’t believe this motherboard would be the best for you. Overall I would give this motherboard an 8/10. I would like to thank AOpen for sending me this board to review.
Pros
- Black PCB
- USB 2.0
- Good price
- ATX power supply connection moved to a better place
- The board is very well laid out
- Has ATA-133 support
- Lots of room around the socket
- Onboard PC speaker
Cons
- DIP switches
- No onboard RAID
- No VDIMM adjustments
- Not enough memory tweaking options