The AOpen AOpen AK77 Pro(A)-133 motherboard comes with the VIA Apollo KT266a chipset. The 266a chipset is the successor to the VIA 266 chipset, like the VIA 133 chipset is to the 133a. The motherboard also comes with the VT8233A southbridge rather than the VT8233.
The VIA Apollo KT266A features an enhanced memory controller, designed with exceptionally high performance in mind. Supporting DDR200/266 memory, the VIA Apollo KT266A provides lightning fast access to system memory. Timings have been improved, resulting in faster transfers between the synchronized Front Side Bus and Memory Bus. Data queues have been deepened, allowing faster and more efficient access to buffered data. The end result is the industry’s fastest DDR memory controller.
The AOpen AOpen AK77 Pro(A)-133 motherboard has a lot of cool features which we will look at in much more detail later in this review but here is a quick overview of what the board has to offer
Key Features
- Support 266MHz(EV6) System Bus for AMD Athlon / XP & Duron Socket A CPU
- Support PC1600/PC2100 DDR SDRAM
- Jumper-less Design
- DIE-HARD BIOS with External Controller (Upgrade optional)
- CPU clock ratio from 5.5 to 12.5
- Support 1X / 2X / 4X AGP mode
- AC’97 2.1 Audio support / Audio Codec onboard
- CPU Vcore Adjustment for Overclockers through BIOS Setting (1.1V ~1.85V)
- Supports 4 USB ports
- 1MHz Stepping Frequency Adjustment
- Support Ultra DMA/133 HDD (Additional UDMA/133 Cable included)
- Wake-On-LAN / Modem
- 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)
Specifications
CPU: AMD Athlon / XP (Socket A) AMD Duron (Socket A)
ASIC: VIA KT266A / VT8233A AGPset
Architecture: 1 CNR slot + 5 PCI slots +1 AGP slot
Max. Main Memory: Max. 3GB DDR SDRAM for 184pin DIMM*3
DIMM Type: 64/128/256/512 MB/1GB
On Board Sound: Analog Devices AC’97 CODEC onboard
Battery: 3V Lithium Battery
Green Function: Yes
BIOS: Award Plug and Play 2Mb Flash ROM BIOS
Board Size: 244mm x 305mm, ATX Form Factor
The top of the box is very cool looking and lets you take a look inside to see what you will be getting. The bottom of the box shows you some of the major features of the board.
The AOpen AK77 Pro(A)-133 comes with an ATA133 cable, a floppy cable, and ATA33 cable. Its nice that they provide an ATA133 cable to take advantage of the ATA133 controller provided. The motherboard also comes with a CD which contains drivers, and utilities. It includes version 4.37 of the VIA 4-in1 drivers which is the newest version to date. The motherboard also comes with Norton Antivirus 2002 which is very cool.
The AOpen AK77 Pro(A)-133 comes with a lot of good, high quality documentation. It comes with a manual and an “easy installation guide.” I would have liked to see the BIOS described better in the manual, but that is the only thing that was a negative.
The AOpen AK77 Pro(A)-133 has a killer looking black PCB, I really like it a lot. The board is well laid out from just looking at it, we will see later if it installs as well as it looks. The only thing that I do not like from looking at it is the CNR slot I find that these serve little to no purpose and would have rather seen another PCI slot.
The VIA 266a northbridge is covered by a nice aluminum heatsink as you can see from the picture above. The heatsink has no clips which hold the cooler in place so I twisted it off and found that it is attached by thermal tape. Like I have mentioned before I do not like the use of thermal tape on any components, even though the northbridge will not get very hot and does not require the best cooling it would be better if thermal compound was used. I went ahead and removed the thermal tape and replaced the heatsink with Arctic Alumina epoxy
Like I mentioned before the AK77 Pro(A)-133 has ATA133 capabilities which is denoted on the southbridge of the motherboard. You can also see just to the left of the southbridge there is a chip missing. This is where the RAID controller would be which is available on the plus version of the board. Both of the IDE and floppy connections are at the top of the board which is a good thing. You can see the imprint of where the RAID would be on the board under the regular IDE connections.
The AOpen AK77 Pro(A)-133 comes with a die-hard BIOS with optional upgrade. This feature which you can upgrade to is a backup BIOS that you can install which 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 jumpers on the board are very well laid out all in a line in one location, not all over the place like some other boards. There are also a lot of different jumpers which is nice, there is another optional upgrade which is the Dr.LED it’s a diagnostic LED system for troubleshooting. Again it would be nice if this was included, however that would raise the cost of the board. You also get Infrared jumpers, a fan header, front audio jumpers which is a cool addition, the system jumpers and the CMOS jumper.
The AK77 Pro(A)-133 comes with on-board sound which uses the AC97 CODEC as do most of the motherboards today with onboard sound. The motherboard has 3 connectors that will go to your CDROM devices if you decide to use the onboard sound.
The I/O panel has a gameport, MIC-in, line-in, and speaker out. I used this while benchmarking the games which you will see the results of later and listened to a few MP3s. The quality is good but not great, if you are not worried about 5.1 digital sound this will work great for you. To the right of all of this you can also see the header for the northbridge heatsink and another above it for the CPU heatsink.
The AK77 Pro(A)-133 has DIP switches 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.
I started installing all of the hardware to setup a test bed, I liked the fact that the AGP slot was far away enough from the DDR slots so that you can take out RAM while a video card is installed. Everything went together well and without any trouble, there was enough room around the socket to accommodate my SVC Glacial Cooler 68 heatsink and should have no problem with large 80mm heatsinks. The only thing that was a little irritating was that the ATX motherboard power connector was too close to the first DDR slot, I was unable to remove the plug while the RAM was installed.
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 “Standard CMOS Features” section is the same as almost every other board, it contains the time, drives, and some memory info. The “Advanced BIOS features” contains cache options, boot order, and some other optional settings.
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 to be very lacking in memory tweaking options. The only thing that is in there which is useful is the “SDRAM CAS Latency Time,” “DRAM Queue Length,” and “DRAM Command Rate.” The “AGP P2P Bridge Control” menu however was good, it has all the options you really need to get the most out of the AGP slot.
The “Integrated Peripherals” menu is where you can change all the settings for most of the onboard things such as the IDE, floppy, sound, modem and so on. The “Power Management Setup” section is where all the ACPI, power saving, and sleep options are.
The “PNP/PCI Configurations” section is just that, you can choose some of your PNP and PCI options here. The “PC Health Status” is where you can see temperatures, fan RPM, and voltages of your system.
The “Frequency/Voltage Control” section is where you will find voltage and FSB settings. For the voltage you can select from 1.100v to 1.85v. To adjust the FSB settings you have two options, you can use the table or do it manually. The table is a stepping of FSB and the manual setting you can go from 130-248FSB in 1Mhz increments. I really like the fact that this board is able to go up to 248Mhz for a FSB, if you have some good hardware you could have a really good overclock. I don’t really see the point in having the “Table” setting I only used the “Manual” stting which is much better.
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.
Test Bed
- AOpen AK77 Pro(A)-133
- Duron 700
- 256MB Crucial PC2100
- 3DPower Geforce 3
- Antec 300w PSU
- SVC Glacial Cooler 68
As you can see I will be benchmarking first with a Duron 700 with a FSB of 100Mhz
I ran SiSoft Sandra Pro 2002.1.8.59 and benchmarked the CPU, Multimedia, and memory bandwidth, because its a Duron 700Mhz and at 100Mhz FSB the scores are nothing spectacular, however this is just to get an idea of how much of a boost overclocking will give us later.
The scores for 3DMark2000 are not very good because of the stock speed and the 100Mhz FSB of this CPU. However you will see later that with a little overclocking that the scores will look much better.
3DMark2001 scores are also not very good for the same reasons, but later you will see that they as well will increase to a much nicer score.
Quake 3 performance was pretty good even with the slow CPU, even at 1600×1200 I still got 76.8 FPS which is more than enough to play the game without anything being choppy.
Serious Sam frame rates were less than desirable however this is again due to the slow CPU and low FSB speed.
I was very impressed with this board and how far I was able to push the FSB. I dropped the multiplier to 6 using the DIP switch, and I overclocked the default 100Mhz FSB all the way up to 160Mhz! After trying some different multiplier and FSB settings I achieved a speed of 990Mhz. The system would boot at 166, but it locked up while running 3Dmark2001SE. If I had some better RAM I am sure I would have been able to get it higher.
I ran SiSoft Sandra Pro 2002.1.8.59 and benchmarked the CPU, Multimedia, and memory bandwidth again. As you can see there is a huge increase in the CPU, and multimedia benchmark and the memory bandwidth is a lot higher than the default setting.
Even though the motherboard only has a Duron 700Mhz CPU in it, when it’s overclocked to 990Mhz with a FSB of 160Mhz the results for 3DMark2000 are really good.
3DMark2001SE also has a much better score when overclocked, the only reason that it is a little low is because it’s a Duron.
Quake 3 results are great, even at 1600×1200 with all the eye candy turned on I still got 84.3 FPS. Every other resolution I tested at got over 100 FPS.
Serious Sam benchmarking proved to stress the system more than Quake 3. At 1600×1200 I got 37.7 FPS which is a little low but with all the other resolutions below that the FPS are very good and it would not look choppy at all.
Conclusion
I really like this board a lot, the AK77 Pro(A)-133 has a lot of great features and is a good board for overclocking. I really like the design and layout of the board, I also really like the black PCB. The only thing I would change is the position of the ATX plug which they have done on the KT333 model. I really like the fact that it is able to handle such a high FSB.
The only thing I did not really like about this board is that there are DIP switches, and there should be more memory tweaking options as well as a VDIMM adjustment which would also help in getting a higher FSB. Even though the KT333 chipset is already out this board can still hang with the big boys, with good RAM and a good CPU I’m sure that it could perform as well as a KT333 board.
If you want a great socket A, KT266a board you cannot go wrong with this one. I would like to again thank AOpen for sending me this board to review.
Pros
- Great overclocker
- High FSB options
- Good price
- Cool looking black PCB
- The board is very well laid out
- Has ATA133 support
- Lots of room around the socket
- Onboard PC speaker
Cons
- DIP switches
- CNR slot
- No VDIMM adjustments
- Not enough memory tweaking options