Friday, December 06, 2002

Introduction

The AOpen AK77-8X Max is an all-new AMD Athlon motherboard with support for 200/266/333MHz FSB frequencies. The AK77-8X is based on the VIA KT400 Northbridge, and the VT8235 Southbridge.

Because of this arrangement, AOpen's latest and greatest benefits from a number of modern features. These include 8X AGP, Serial ATA150 connectors, and support for DDR400 memory.

The AOpen AK77-8X also comes complete with a six-channel sound-card, a Realtek 10/100Base-T network controller, Firewire support, and six USB 2.0 ports.

(Please note that Firewire support, and Serial ATA connectors are only available with the "Max" rendition of the AK77-8X.)

Audio

The AOpen AK77-8X Max's audio circuitry is based around a Realtek ALC650 sound-chip. The ALC650 supports AC3, and 5.1 Surround Sound, and allows users to hook-in up to six audio channels, including a center base channel.

From a fidelity standpoint, the Realtek AL650 is quite good at what it does, and should satisfy most users.

Configuration

The AOpen AK77-8X only has a handful of jumpers to speak of, but only one among them has anything to do with the CPU; it can be used to set the FSB frequency to 100/133/166 or 200MHz.

Once everything's in place then, configuration requires little more than dropping into th BIOS.

Once there, the "Frequency/Voltage" menu is the immediate choice for most Overclockers, and it is there that they will find the option to adjust the FSB frequency to run at between 100Mhz and 248Mhz (in 1Mhz increments) or let the system determine a proper frequency automatically.

The clock multiplier can also be set to between 5X and 18X.

The Vcore, DDR, and AGP voltages can also be adjusted to correspond to any of the numbers indicated in the table above.

The BIOS also allows users to set the memory bus frequency to (200/266/333/400Mhz).

And finally, a number of memory timing options are also available to be tweaked to the user's content.

Next: Technical details.

AOpen AK77-8x Max