VIA KT133A Motherboard Roundup - June 2001

AOpen AK73 ProA

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In the past, AOpen had become one of our favorite motherboard manufacturers thanks to outstanding products that won more Editor's Choice Awards than any other manufacturer. Unfortunately, they've been less impressive of late and, quite frankly, the AK73 ProA was quite disappointing. It may be a good candidate for the OEM market, but it simply lacks a number of features that hardware enthusiasts want.

The layout of the board is based on the KT133 based AK73-1394 and is pretty decent. Unlike that board, AOpen didn't include the IEEE 1394 Firewire controller on our evaluation sample. However, we expect a version with Firewire to appear shortly since the silkscreening already in place for the controller.

As far as overclocking goes, the multiplier ratio settings are implemented through a set of dipswitches, meaning that you will have to shut down the system to modify the multiplier. The same goes for the I/O voltage controls except that they are controlled by jumpers instead of dipswitches. CPU core voltage, on the other hand, is adjustable in the BIOS.

Dipswitches for multiplier ratio settings

Multipliers are not adjustable in the BIOS

Like many other AOpen motherboards, FSB settings are semi-jumperless. You can select your desired FSB speed inside the BIOS, but the available speeds are determined by the position of two jumpers on the board. Even then, the choices are limited, with a total of just 27 entries. If you look at FSB speeds higher than 133MHz, you will notice that there are quite a few gaps that could prevent you from reaching the true limit of your CPU and/or memory.

Stability of the board is not particularly impressive either, crashing a total of four times in 24 hours, which was second worse among this group. This was somewhat surprising since AOpen has always been known for its quality and stability, but that's just not the case with the AK73 ProA unfortunately.

The AK73 ProA features five PCI and one AMR slots, which is pretty standard today. However, AOpen has yet to implement features such as a RAID controller on any of their boards, although the Firewire option may be more useful to some. AOpen does continue to include their Die-Hard BIOS, which is very similar to Gigabyte's Dual BIOS feature. Basically, there are two BIOS chips on the board, and in the case of corrupted BIOS, you can switch and boot from the backup to recover your system. In the case of Die-Hard BIOS, you have to physically move a jumper to make the change.

In short, we are quite disappointed with AOpen's AK73 ProA, since it not only lacks the necessary overclocking options for users, but the stability was also below par.