Conclusion
The new VT82C686B helps all boards score well in business and video applications. 3D games and OpenGL application do not benefit from the new south bridge, as you can see in our tests.
In terms of performance the AOpen AK73 Pro was pretty impressive. It beat our previous performance leader, the ASUS A7V, in the majority of benchmarks.
The AK73 allows the adjustment of the Athlon-multiplier (after shortening the L1-bridges of the CPU), which makes it attractive for overclockers. However, the adjustment of the system bus clock in 1 MHz steps is missing.
Better solutions for our overclocking fans are the Soltek SL-75KV2 and the MSI K7T Pro2-A . These motherboards are the only ones in this review that let you adjust the system bus clock in steps of 1 MHz.
Unfortunately, the performance results of those two are not so good compared to the other candidates. These interrelations can change very quickly though. We have learned that a simple BIOS update can give impressive performance boosts.
