AOpen AK79D Max nForce2 Motherboard

About seven months ago I was in the market for some PC upgrades, which included a new motherboard. I wanted to get the most bang for my buck, like any sensible consumer. At the time, the chipsets I had to choose from were VIA's KT333 and KT400 and NVIDIA's nForce. Unfortunately, that's the first generation nForce that I'm talking about. The nforce2 chipset was not quite out yet. I delayed my purchase for a little while hoping motherboards with the highly anticipated nForce2 chipset would enter the market. My patience grew thin, so I opted for a motherboard with the KT400 chipset, the Gigabyte GA-7VAXP. Actually KT400-based mainboards were fairly scarce at that time, too. I opted for the KT400 over the more mature KT333 since it had some better integrated features, and it was more cutting edge. But, now, thanks to AOpen (and bjorn3d, of course), I have my chance to see if all this hype about the nForce2 chipset is justified.

AOpen's AK79D Max is the motherboard that I have been given the opportunity to review. This board is nearly identical to the AOpen AK79G Max that Shane reviewed in early April. The difference is that the G replaces the D in the model name, and the G obviously denotes integrated graphics. So, hopefully you've figured out that this is basically the same board minus the integrated Geforce4 MX capability. Of course, it has all the other goodies you'd expect from an nForce2 motherboard, like integrated LAN controller, sound, USB, and IEEE1394. And that's only the tip of the iceberg for the AK79D Max's feature set. Since Shane's review covered all of the features that are shared by the AK79D and G and probably covered some in more detail, you may want to check out his review if you're wanting more information or different thoughts about these features.

To make this review a little different, I decided to do a comparison of my old Gigabyte GA-7VAXP and the AK79D Max with two different memory configurations. I've always wondered how much I could benefit from a dual channel memory architecture, so I decided to try to answer that question with this review.

Please keep in mind that the board discussed in this review is an engineering sample. Nothing physically looks different from the same board on AOpen's website; however, AOpen could have tweaked some timings or anything else for final production boards.

Here are the obligatory Specs and Features tables, taken from AOpen.

Specifications:

Features:

With all these features, the AK79D Max allows for a lot of flexibility. It seems as if AOpen is trying to appeal to the tweakers and overclockers with the various voltage and stepping settings in the BIOS as well as the PC user who may be looking for something new with features like the JukeBox CD player and VividBIOS.

Package Contents:

• Easy Installation Guide
• Enhanced Full Pictured Manual
• EzRestore Guide
• Bonus Pack CD disc
• Norton Anti-Virus CD disc
• Floppy Disk cable
• 1 40-wire IDE cable
• 1 80-wire ATA133 cable
• 1 Serial ATA cable
• IEEE 1394 cable/bracket
• Two ports USB2.0 cable/bracket
• S/PDIF cable/bracket
• Back Panel I/O Shield

I commend AOpen for nicely packing all this stuff and the motherboard in a box that is smaller than any motherboard box I have ever seen. I think any amount of reduction in packaging is a good thing. So AOpen gets props from me for that, especially when you consider the size of the heatsink (see picture on next page) and some of the capacitors on this board. The so-called Bonus Pack CD contains all the stuff that should be packaged with the board, such as the driver and utility installation files, as well as a few extras, like Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 and Microsoft DirectX 8.1. These extras are nice but not quite what some would consider a "Bonus Pack," but to each his own, I guess.