Friday, May 17, 2002

Technical details

Plenty of space has been left open around the CPU socket, which should allow for the installation of large heatsinks.

The memory slots are located far enough from the AGP port that there is little chance of a retention bar coming into contact with the graphics card when installing memory.

The voltage regulation circuits are of the triple phase, bi-Mosfets variety.

Three 3300mfds, and fifteen 2200mfds capacitors have been placed around the CPU socket.

The ATX connector is located in an unfortunate position next to the Northbridge, which forces power cables to be contoured around the CPU.

The CPU retention bar is made of metal, so there's little chance of it breaking.

The VT8363A Northbridge is capped with a heatsink and fan.

Three fan connectors are included, but one is utilized by the Northbridge fan, and only two are controlled by the hardware monitoring system.

Hardware monitoring is controlled by a Winbond W83697HF circuit.

It's not possible to manually assign IRQs.

USB 2.0 (480Mbps) ports are present, and are controlled by a VIA VT6202 circuit.

Audio capabilities are supplied by a Realtek ALC650 chip

The AK77-333 benefits from many of the small refinements common to AOpen motherboards, including low resistance capacitors, "Frequency Isolation Wall", "Die-Hard BIOS", "Watch Dog Timer", and "Resettable Fuses", as well as an option Dr LED diagnostic panel.

Unfortunately the BIOS cannot be rolled-back to the last batch of valid settings by simply pressing "Insert", or a similar hot-key at start-up. On the up-side, the "Watch Dog Timer" makes such an ability unnecessary, by keeping tabs on system settings and remembering the last batch of valid values. If the system refuses to boot after a bit of tinkering, Watch Dog Timer will wait 5 seconds before restoring the BIOS to a working state. Needless to say, this makes it next to impossible for users to render their systems unbootable.

Next: Additional features.