The first thing that strikes you about AOpen's latest offering for AMD's Athlon 64, the AK89 Max, is the understated white box, which makes a nice change from the usual box of garish graphics. It may be plain, but it's well packed with goodies.
Based around nVidia's nForce3 150 chipset, the feature-rich board is built on AOpen's familiar glossy black full size ATX PCB and comes with integrated Serial ATA RAID, Gigabit Ethernet, 5.1 audio and FireWire. The nForce3 MCH chip is passively cooled by a low profile aluminium heatsink.
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This isn't a board for the more compact case as the three DIMM slots sit at the top of the board near the CPU, making access difficult in some case designs. The three slots provide support for up to 3GB of DDR400 (PC3200) memory. For expansion the board has five PCI slots, with the fifth having its own separate 3.3 volt power supply, ideal for PCI cards that have constant high power needs, such as RAID and SCSI cards.
A Silicon Image Sil 3114 chip controls the SATA RAID setup. With four SATA ports you can set the RAID up as RAID 0 (striping), RAID 1 (mirroring) or RAID 1+0 (mirrored stripe). Realtek chips provide support for the audio and LAN functions; an ALC655 provides 5.1 audio plus S/PDIF input and output functions; and a RTL8110S-32 chip supplies 10/100/1000Base-T network capability.
Also featured is AOpen's Die Hard BIOS, which comprises two BIOS chips and provides useful protection against the main BIOS chip being damaged by a virus or bad flashing.
As with all the top end AOpen boards it comes loaded with useful utilities, including AOConfig, a basic DMI utility; EzClock, a Windows based overclocking tool; and EzRestore, which allows you to restore the PC to before it was infected by a virus or made unstable by a bad installation of software or hardware.
Perhaps the most useful tool is EzWinFlash, which allows the BIOS to be flashed under Windows; similarly, WinBIOS lets you make adjustments to the BIOS under the Windows environment.
Underneath the cardboard tray that holds the motherboard lies an Aladdin's cave of extra hardware. There are three expansion plates holding extra ports - one with a game port and two USB 2.0 ports, one with two FireWire ports, and an S/PDIF plate with in/out RCA and optical ports. Cables comprise floppy, E-IDE (40 and 80 conductor), SATA data and power. AOpen's customary colour setup poster also explains the functions of the motherboard's components.
Overall, the AK89 Max is a richly featured and well priced motherboard.
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