5 New SocketA Boards With UltraATA/100

The Motherboards In Detail

AOpen AK73 Pro

BIOS-Version: 8th November 2000

Board-Revision: 00812

When we unpacked this board we were positively surprised. The AK73 Pro has a special mounting clip for the AGP card. This way the graphics card cannot slip out unintentionally. An AGP-Pro slot is optional. It is one of the first boards for Athlon and Duron-CPUs that's equipped with the new Southbridge 686B. Both IDE channels therefore support ATA/100 hard disks. Furthermore, this board uses ACPI (Suspend to Ram) and S4 (Suspend to Disk) - a great advantage for quick booting.

Just as on the AK33, AOpen uses several LEDs for easy boot-up errors diagnosis. In case of an error during installation (with the case opened) the 8 LEDs provide you information about the current boot status. This process is supported by verbal help from "Dr. Voice". In order to enjoy this feature you need to enter the BIOS setup and choose English language first though. Otherwise you might have trouble understanding the Chinese Dr. Voice coming out of the small speaker.

You can change the multiplier for the CPU via Dipswitches on the board or in the BIOS. Overclockers have to use an AMD-processor with closed L1-contacts (use a lead pencil and apply some thin tape to secure it). That's less convenient: You can choose a system clock between 100 and 120 MHz, but not in 1 MHz-steps. At least you can increase the CPU's Vcore in 0.025 V-steps up to 1,85 V.

Maximum RAM on this board is 1.5 GByte and you can put PC100, PC133, SDRAM or VCM into the three memory slots. You can use this all-round board for every purpose thanks to 5 PCI slots, Sound (with AD1885 codec) onboard, Wake-on-LAN and Wake-on-Modem. 4 USB ports complete the equipment of the AK73. Unfortunately, the cable for the 2 additional USB ports is missing.