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AOpen AK73Pro(A) Motherboard


Date
: 06/1/01 – 02:35:06 AM

Author
:

Category
: Motherboard

Page 1 :

Manufacturer: AOpen
Price: around $130

Thanks to AOpen for supplying us with the AK73Pro(A) Mainboard!

Introduction

Personally, I find it extremely difficult to chose the right Socket A mainboard for the job. Remember that we have really good DDR solutions coming into play these days, but we also and still have these good old high performance KT133A mainboards from manufacturers like Abit or EPoX that allow high FSB speeds. When we combine these FSB speeds (150MHz and above) with some high quality performance SDRAM that is capable of running these speeds @ CAS2, performance will be close to (or even better than (??)) DDR performance! You also don’t have to buy new DDR RAM if you stick with a KT133A based mobo … oh and by the way, SDRAM is becoming really, really cheap nowerdays! That’s why one should still be very interested in all these KT133A mainboards.

Well now, got you interested in a KT133A board again? GOOD! Because today we’re about to take a closer look at the KT133A solution from AOpen, the AK73Pro(A). We’re going to talk about the specs on this board, we’ll also be doing some benchmarking with this board and what interests OC Online most … overclocking the hell out of it!

Now let’s first take a look at what AOpen has to say about their AK73Pro(A) board … after that we will discuss these specs briefly :

Page 2 : Specs and the Rest

Specifications

Here’s the complete AK73Pro(A) spec list (copy/paste from the AOpen website) :

• Support 266MHz(EV6) System Bus for AMD Athlon (Thunderbird) & Duron Socket A CPU
• Support PC133 SDRAM DIMM
• Jumper-less Design
• DIE-HARD BIOS wtih External Controller (Upgrade optional)
• CPU clock ratio from 5.5 to 12.5
• Support 1X / 2X / 4XAGP mode
• AC’97 2.1 Audio support / Audio Codec onboard
• Enlarged Aluminum Heatsink for Better Heat Dissipation
• CPU Vcore Adjustment for Overclockers through BIOS Setting (1.1V ~1.85V)
• Supports 4 USB ports
• Hardware Monitoring
• Support Ultra DMA/100 HDD (Additional UDMA/100 Cable included)
• 3.3V Main Power adjustable
• Dr. LED(Upgrade optional)
• Dr. Voice
• Wake On LAN
• Wake On RTC Timer
• 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)
• Year 2000 Compliant
• AOpen Bonus Pack CD (Norton Anti-Virus 2000 included)

CPU

AMD Athlon Thunderbird (Socket A)
AMD Duron(Socket A)

ASIC

VIA VT8363A / VT82C686B AGPset

Architecture

1 AMR slot + 5 PCI slots +1 AGP slot

Max. Main Memory

Max. 1.5GB SDRAM ( PC-100 or PC-133 ) or VCM for 168pin DIMM*3

DIMM Type

8/16/32/64/128/256/512 MB

On Board Sound

Analog Devices AD1885 AC97 CODEC onboard

On Board I/O

1 Serial Ports (UART 16C550 Support)
1 Parallel Port (SPP/EPP/ECP Support)
2 Channel E-IDE (Mode 4 and Bus master Ultra DMA 33/66/100 Support)
1 Floppy Drive Connector (1.2/1.44/2.88MB)
2 Universal Serial Bus Ports
1 PS/2 Mouse Port
1 PS/2 Keyboard Port
Game/Midi Port ,Speaker-Out ,Line-In , Mic-In

Onboard Connector

CD-In, Modem-In , Video-Audio-in , Audio 1, IrDA , Wake-On-Lan , CPU Fan,
Chassis Fan, Fan2 , Additional 2 USB Ports (via Optional cable)

Battery

3V Lithium Battery

Green Function

Yes

BIOS

Award Plug and Play 2MB Flash ROM BIOS

Board Size

244mm x 305mm, ATX Form Factor

Interesting to know is that this board comes in quite some different flavors. What I mean is that you can buy this board with or without goodies like DIE-HARD BIOS and Dr. Led. Not really important, but maybe it’s good to know this huh!

We reviewed the most simple and also cheapest version … the one without Dr. Led, Dr. Voice and the DIE HARD BIOS.

Now let’s discuss these specs more in detail, shall we …

The Specs In Detail – Impression

The layout of the AK73Pro(A) is great. Nope, there’s really nothing bad to say about this. The design is exactly the same as on the AK73Pro KT133 (non-A) board from AOpen. That probably saved them a lot of money while engineering the board.

Both IDE connectors as well as the floppy disk drive connector are on the right side of the board. The DIMMs are situated right next to the CPU socket (on the right side) and they are NOT blocking the AGP card in any way. What I really like about this board is that the ATX power connector is situated on the top edge of the board. This prevents the big fat PSU cable from hanging over the board and the CPU preventing the airflow in your case. There’s plenty of space around the CPU socket expect maybe to the left side of the socket as the transistors are very close here, but normally you shouldn’t have any problem installing a bigass HSF onto your CPU … Apart from the nice black PCB and the expensive looking silver passive heatsink on the Northbridge, the layout of this board isn’t much different from any other Socket A board on the market today.

If you read the specs correctly, you’ll know that the AOpen AK73Pro(A) supports up to 1.5GB PC100/133 SDRAM in 3 DIMM sockets. Want to install more memory on this board? Sorry, no can do! The VIA KT133A chipset has a 1.5GB memory limit. Nothing to blame AOpen for here.

Because the AK73Pro(A) uses the VIA 686B Southbridge, it now features native UDMA/100 support. No onboard RAID on this one, guys. Of course, you can always go out and buy a RAID controller if you want.

The board has 1 AGP slot, 5 PCI slots, a shared AMR slot (I would have rather seen a 6th PCI slot or an ISA slot). The package also bundles a fold-out Easy Installation Guide, a well-sized paper manual, two IDE leads (one 80 wire ATA100 and one standard 40 wire) and a floppy drive cable. And AOpen wouldn’t be AOpen if they didn’t include a bonus CDROM with some anti-virus software on it … this might come in handy for all of us sometime.

Our test sample didn’t have the optional features like Dr. LED and a DIE-HARD BIOS. I will tell you about these features very briefly … Dr. Voice is your personal assistant during bootup. ‘He’ will notify you of any potential problems during the POST process. The DIE-HARD BIOS is basicly just a second chip containing the same BIOS as the default BIOS chip. In case of a chip/BIOS crash or if something goes completely wrong with the BIOS, the second chip can be used by just changing a jumper on the board. Can’t tell you whether these goodies rock or suck … Sorry :(

Our sample did have onboard sound so I’m forced to say something about it. Although there’s not much to say about it really except that … euhm … it sucks. No really, it DOESN’T SUCK that much but I’m not quite fond of these onboard sound solutions. However, I did actually test the Analog Devices AD1885 AC97 CODEC on this AK73Pro(A) and let me tell you the sound quality is pretty much alright. But it really eats away much of your CPU power and that’s why I should advise you to use a SoundBlaster card or something like that.

You also might have seen the words ‘Jumper-less design’ somewhere in de spec list. We will show you that this statement in not entirely 100% true. But we will go deeper into the use of DIP switches, jumpers and Vcore adjustments in our overclocking section.

Overclocking

Before I show you how good/bad this board lets you overclock your CPU, I believe we first have to discuss the ‘Jumper-less design’ of this mainboard … Let me tell you that this board is far from being completely jumperless or jumperfree!

First of all, the CPU multiplier has to be changed by setting the right combination on 4 DIP switches right above the CPU socket and to the left of the ATX power connector. The multiplier can be set from 5x to 12.5x. There’s no way of doing that in the BIOS!

A FSB speed set has to be chosen through a jumper to the right of the DIMMs. A first set of FSBs goes from 100-120MHz while the second one goes from 124-166MHz. If you leave the jumper in the default position (100-120MHz), the BIOS allows you to select one of these FSB speeds : 100, 102, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112 – 116, 118, 120MHz. If you set the jumper to the second position, the following FSB speeds will be enabled : 124, 129, 130, 133, 136, 140, 145, 150, 155, 160, 166MHz … now what do you notice here? Right! NO 1MHz increments :(

The I/O voltage also needs to be changed through 2 jumpers and can NOT be altered in the BIOS. You can chose between 3.2v, 3.3v, 3.4v and 3.5v … Yep folks, that’s it. 3.5v is the highest possible I/O voltage on this motherboard. This doesn’t predict much good when we’re going to overclock our CPU with this board …

The CPU tab in the BIOS allows you to alter the CPU core voltage (from 1.1v – 1.85v in 0.25v increments) and the FSB speed … that’s about it! The Advanced Chipset Features tab in the BIOS lets you change memory timings. Pretty much all you need to tweak your memory speed can be found here except for the memory interleaving adjustment :(

After doing experimenting with some FSB speeds, core voltage settings, 3.3v I/O voltage settings and stuff, I found my Duron 850 (tested stable up to 1100MHz) to be stable @ 1050MHz using a 7x multiplier and a FSB speed of 140MHz. I’d like to note that this is the maximum FSB speed we could squeeze out of this board … even with high performance SDRAM like the OCZ Performance Max SDRAM and the I/O voltage crancked up to 3.5v (the max on this board!) A 140MHz FSB isn’t that bad at all, but we expect to see much more from a KT133A chipset, don’t we?! I guess the 3.5v I/O voltage limit is the real bottleneck on this board :(

Benchmarking – Testing

System setup

- AOpen HQ45 case
- AOpen AK73Pro(A) / Abit KT7A-RAID (reviewed here)
- Tt Volcano II cooler
- AMD Duron 850 CPU
- 128MB OCZ Performance MAX SDRAM
- Western Digital UDMA100 45GB 7200RPM hard drive
- Creative Annihilator Pro (GeForce 256 DDR not overclocked)
- Win2k + SP1 + DirectX 8a
- VIA 4in1 4.31 + Detonator 6.50

Sisoft Sandra 2001 Pro

7.5 x 133

7.5 x 140

CPU Mark 99

FPU Mark 99

The AK73Pro(A) performed quite good in our tests, but all in all, nothing to write home about. All benchmark scores are situated around the average level you would expect from a KT133A board.

Good

- 100% stable
- Nice avarage performance
- KT133A chipset
- Great board layout (BLACK!!)
- Great features like Dr. Led, Dr. Voice, etc.

Bad

- NO RAID support
- No ISA slot & only 5 PCIs slots (can be a problem sometimes)
- Onboard sound
- Max. 3.5v I/O voltage
- DIP switches & Jumpers
- Max. 140MHz FSB

Conclusion

The AK73Pro(A) is a great board when we look at it in terms of stability, layout, etc. … but it’s overclocks really BAD! We should be able to run a 150MHz FSB on this KT133A based board without any problems, but instead we have to be satisfied with at least 10MHz less than that … simply because 140MHz is the highest you can get out of this motherboard :( When we look at the board in general, we see that it can’t quite compete with similar boards from other manufacturers like Abit, MSI, EPoX, IWill, etc.

Then why should one buy this board instead of an Abit or MSI KT133A board? Well, the AK73Pro(A) from AOpen has the nicest and sweetest black PCB, has a great layout in general and performs good if you’re not to deep into overclocking … The choice is of course completely yours …

Last minute modification?